Truth/Love/Aletheia Gets Unconcealed Where You Least Expect It

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First off, I have to give props to the Truth and Cake lady.  I was jealous when she showed up on freshly pressed with her pretty pictures and immediate thousand followers after only her second post.  I’d started my blog unconcealing truth two months prior and had only a couple of random followers and then there she was with her cupcake eating pig, pretty face and beautiful words.  Jealous.  I watched to see what she’d put out there because staking a claim to truth is a big stake to claim.  I wanted to be the definitive source of truth on the web.  That’s the thing about truth – it’s truth whether you want it to be or not and nobody owns it.  Very similar to love.

Rian‘s post titled Fail Harder is inspired reading and was the final bitch slap I needed to break me out of my funk.  I’m coming off of two failures that are unprecedented in my life and I’ve been working out how to make sense of them in life and if possible, in the blog.  I haven’t posted in a few weeks, I’ve been having difficulty writing my final paper for MPOD, I’ve been struggling putting together all of the pieces and writing a new policy at work, my life has been occurring as bleak and meandering, and even my recent vacation to St. Martin – while simply fabulous – did not “occur” that way for me.  This blog began inside of one of the failures and it’s been a long and difficult sort of grieving and “making sense of” process.  The other was simply unexpected and really threw me for a loop, threw my confidence off and made me start questioning who the hell I am to be writing about Truth or Love or Aletheia.

Which is why Rian’s post has unconcealed an attachment that I have.  Failing harder is beautiful and describes what I’ve done, where I was stuck, where I’ve been invalidating myself.  (It’s also pointed out that I’m very still attached to the limited perspective that there is a “self” to call my own).  Failing harder is a universal truth, unconcealed Aletheia…sweet beautiful Love.

Briefly, I’ve played hard in two arenas, expecting to “win” or at least expecting to not fail.  (As I type I can hear my ego still trying to find a way out of the first one, the first fail – “well, time will tell”, it says.  “We won’t know for years”, it justifies.)  Which is why the second fail, so immediate and definite, really brought up the shut-myself-down defense mechanism that I’ve perfected since Ms. Hein didn’t give me all the awards that I “deserved” in third grade.

I’m going to focus on this second fail for the remainder of this post as I still haven’t figured out how to be straight about the other fail without compromising other people’s space.  While I am committed to full disclosure, no stone unturned, full revelation and display of my “self” for the betterment of our shared “Self” there are boundaries that I share with family, friends, co-workers, or other human beings in general where they may not be as open and willing to disclose.

Playing the game of Master’s student has been immense fun and I didn’t get into it even considering the scoreboard.  I was so blown away when I saw the curriculum of the Master’s of Positive Organizational Development program at Case that I jumped on it immediately.  Certainly there were a few hurdles to overcome and work out but the decision was immediate.  It was why I never began an MBA program…I just wasn’t committed to what an MBA would develop me as.  But this, man, this is who I already was and I’d get to claim to be a Master at it.  This program would take the block of stone that I was up until that point and carve me up into David leaving me refined and powerful and able to cause change with not only profound logic and theory, but with results and data driven deliverables.

Somewhere around the middle of the program I made a crucial mistake and looked up at the scoreboard and I noticed I was winning.  Other people made comments about grades they’d gotten on certain papers and I just kept my mouth shut.  It was all A’s for me.  I’d gotten a B on one paper but there were other assignments in the class that averaged the grade out to an A overall.  Once I noticed the scoreboard all the machinery kicked into gear.  The assignments started to take on more significance and I added meaning to all of my actions, more care was taken in delivering assignments the “right” way, and some of the experience of fun and love of learning for learning’s sake was worn away.

Fear slowly became the programming language of choice and it started to show up in my reality.  The assignments seemed more difficult, managing “all of life” became more arduous, occurred as difficult, things started to show up in the space of life that hadn’t been there before.  My created space that I lead a charmed life started to occur as a something to question rather than a place to come from.  Now, a story in retrospect is always a little more dramatic than the occurring, so it didn’t necessarily seem all that bad at the time but there was definitely some undistinguished shaping of the future occurring.  I continued trying to get back to Aletheia, had a harder time being Love present and experienced in the world. After all, I had all these things that I had to manage and control, and I had to perform well enough to maintain my A’s.

Failing harder wasn’t something I was planning.  I hadn’t played the get all A’s game this well, this long, this hard probably since that third grade with Ms. Hein.  I gave it a go on my bachelor’s degree long enough to prove that I still had what had always come easy to me and even had a couple of 4.0 quarters, made the dean’s list, and was happy to know that I could call it up if I really wanted to.  But then the allure of fast cars and faster women took my focus away and I was cool with that.

This time was different though.  This was like first grade, second grade, third grade.  I wasn’t even concerned with the grades I would receive in the class, I just loved the learning.  Ate it up…like truth and cake. When I noticed the scoreboard the experienced world shifted just so slightly based on that experience after third grade ended.  The awards were handed out and I received plenty…I don’t remember which.  Big ribbons for Math and Religion I believe.  First Honors for everything else.  And I was happy.  But then, my Mom would tell me later, Ms. Hein told her that, “He could have gotten some more awards but we had to give some to the other kids.”  That’s the way I remember it anyway.  I was pi$$ed.  What I made up that day was that there was no point in giving everything you had because you weren’t going to get what you deserved anyway.

It was a sort of failing hard by succeeding.

From that point forward my academic effort was lackluster at best.  I’d approach it as a source of Power where I would only give as much effort as I wanted to.  Always knowing that if I really wanted to I could be as brilliant as I wanted to and do A level work.  I sabotaged much of my academic life through high school as a result of that decision made in the early summer after third grade (I made a lot of decisions that summer about people and the world…see other posts, not yet written).  And as Tom Hanks says in Saving Private Ryan after he tells his squad that he’s an English teacher, “I just know that every man I kill the farther away from home I feel.”  Only for me, it was that every time I didn’t give all of myself to any given challenge the farther away from Aletheia I was, the farther away from Self I was.  As I’d give less effort, I’d get less recognition and I’d get more proof that I was right – that I’d never get what I deserved anyway.

Twisted what the human mind does to itself…social constructionism with two idiots.  Your mind and your ego.

I’m an evolved space monkey though and I’d gotten over all of that.  And I’ve given my all to these two endeavors.  In my final semester of Master’s school on the only assignment that wasn’t a pretty much guaranteed A, I got a B.

Logically, I know truth.  Life is empty and meaningless and it’s empty and meaningless that it’s empty and meaningless.  Logic does not make any difference.  Knowing something has no impact on being.  Especially when I’m being “I knew I wouldn’t get what I deserve”.  The beauty of truth, of love, of aletheia is that it isn’t something you can know.  It’s only in experience, in unconcealing and revealing those hidden things that you can live closer from truth.

I failed.  Hard.  The truth and cake lady gives me permission.  Tells me I should fail harder even.  And from there I’m present to Love.  I haven’t met her yet, but I know I’d Love Rian.  But then, I love everybody.  Especially my other Epic Fail.

With Love,

Ed

Sharing Everything

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Leading up to and when my relationship with my wife began I was experimenting with some behaviors that were fairly new to me…ala, experimenting in the cycle of Boyatzis’ Intentional Change Theory.  It didn’t take long until I was seeing powerful results in my relationship to warrant moving from experimentation to practice.  I think what really happened is that I committed to practice anyway prior to seeing any results.  The behavior I’m talking about is one of full disclosure.  Sharing everything.  Whether I wanted to or not.  Whether it seemed like a good idea or not.  Definitely whether it was safe or not.  It took some time, but over the years I felt fully known by another human being.  Not just sort of known, or mostly known, but fully and unequivocally known.

Freeing and powerful are words that come to mind when I think of the new space of relationship that this allowed for.  It really altered what was possible in relationship and at the same time it forced me to alter who I was being not only in the relationship but outside of the relationship.  Certain things that I may have tried to “get away with” in the past weren’t possible anymore when full disclosure was the order of the day.  Being pushed around in shopping carts by drunken friends while totally inebriated took on a whole new meaning when truth was a commitment to be lived from and within.

Despite the fear that is initially present with it, once the possibility of that kind of relationship is revealed there really is no choice anymore.  I first saw it, like a lightning flash, when somebody I knew told me about a truth that she told.  She put everything at risk and told it anyway because she saw that to not tell it was just a waste of time and that to tell it, and to put everything on the line anyway, would change everything in an instant.  That’s the way it works too.  As soon as it comes out of your mouth everything changes.  There’s no taking it back.  It’s a$$ on the line, no holds barred, life at stake.

In that space and with everything on the line, relationships take on a whole new meaning and gain a whole new area to expand into.  Secure, real relationship is built as long as that integrity is maintained.

Eventually, and it takes a while, a certain level of comfort develops with disclosure.  One is secure and grounded in one relationship with another human being that “helps, supports, and encourages each step in the process” and experimentation begins again.

This is where I am today.  I’ve been experimenting with full disclosure.  With many people.  Experimenting, seeing what would happen, observing, pulling back, trying again.  Could I develop deep, powerful relationships with many people?  Create a tribe as some people call them.  Could I be so known by them that they begin to see that I am them as I see that they are me?

Somehow, it doesn’t feel like it’s being courageous when it’s just an experiment.  I’m just learning after all – building on my strengths while reducing my gaps.  But man is it freeing and fun.

With Love,

Ed

Source

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There is one blog I read very regularly.  It’s not even a blog really, but that’s the most common way to describe it in today’s parlance.  It’s not hosted on one of the big blog sites or custom hosted by one of the big blog engines.  Rather than attempting to explain it I’d rather just send you to two of my favorite posts.  One of them is about a snake and the other is about a nametag.  For me these two posts sum up much of our existence, though there is a lot more written in these Conversations For Transformation that point to the whole of it.  It’s just that these two speak to me at the deepest level without actually talking about it, in a similar way that a poet can presence love without even using the word.

Snake – http://www.laurenceplatt.com/wernererhard/snake1.html

Nametag – http://www.laurenceplatt.com/wernererhard/nametaga.html

My relationship with Werner Erhard starts over half of my life ago.  The most common way of putting it is that “I owe my life to Werner Erhard.”  That probably isn’t the clearest way to say what I’m trying to say but it communicates the depth of it.  To say it more clearly is to say that my encounter with his work in the world altered the way I experience my life, both the joys and the sorrows, the love and the fear, and everything in between.  There was my life before I encountered his work and there is my life ever since.  There is also my life ever since ever since in which I actually met Werner, but that’s another story.

Many people probably “owe their lives” to somebody they’ve never met, for example, every citizen (or not) of the United States “owes their life” to the founding fathers of that country and the work, or the manifestation of an idea, that they created.  You can also use the example of formalized religion and the way the customs and norms of that religion shape your life.  I “owe my life” and the way I experience it to being a Catholic.  It’s seldom that the before/after distinction is made so clearly and matter of factly that we actually notice it though.  Now, there have been many things written about this work and it’s value or not, but that isn’t the point of this entry either…maybe that’s another story.

This blog entry is a continued attempt at making sense of who I am as a result of being forever altered by somebody else’s ideas.  In a way you could say that I was created inside of the conversation of that work.  I invented myself in the clearing that was created by my participation in the Forum in 1989.  In the years since my participation I’ve read many scholarly articles about social constructionism (as a general corral for these ideas – though that isn’t necessarily accurate) and the ways in which reality is created by our meaning making in shared conversation.  I had a conversation, guided or led by two other people, over the course of two weekends supported by probably 20 others, paid for in part by myself and in part by a loan made by a complete stranger, and experienced with and through about 125 other people, including my brother-in-law and one of my best friends, and at the end of that conversation I was left with an experience of complete freedom to say what my life was going to be about.  In the 22 years since then I’ve said, and produced, quite a few results that wouldn’t have been possible (or would they) without having had that first Conversation For Transformation.

Laurence, the writer behind Conversations for Transformation, often refers to “Source” and “You” in a very abstract way.  I imagine that it’s meant to be abstract, a little tongue in cheek, a little “slippery”, though I’ve never asked.  It makes sense to me that it is slippery because I experience the slippery-ness of it.  Granting myself the responsibility of having created my own experience is one of the major learnings of the Forum and it’s one of the major learnings of my MPOD coursework as well.  Or is it?  If having that experience was created inside of another’s experiential learning opportunity, how can I be sure that I’ve created it?  The dialetheia of it indirectly points to the self-referential nature of social constructionism and it also indirectly points to Heidegger’s writing on aletheia and the nature of unconcealing. 

The unconcealed aletheia of it occurs for me as there are times when I’m experiencing myself as the source of my experience and there are times when I’m experiencing myself as occurring “inside of” other people as sourcing my experience.  It’s interesting to me that my two intersecting, yet diverging, paths of education are both currently and concurrently leading to similar methods of presencing “something”. 

My MPOD coursework in Europe had quite a bit to do with the use of improvisation as a method for generating “new” types of conversation in organizations and Landmark Education (the current manifestation of Werner’s ideas in the world) offers “The World as Your Stage” workshop.  Additionally, much of my MPOD coursework has centered on recent research from the field of neuroscience and the “proof” of the ways the brain is altered in positive based conversations including Appreciative Inquiry, positive psychology, and Boyatzis’ Intentional Change Theory.  Landmark is currently offering the Direct Access course and the Invented Life seminar which have components of neuroscience smattered in them.  (Full disclosure – I’ve only taken the Invented Life seminar and not the World as Your Stage or Direct Access courses). 

Slightly tongue in cheek then, I ask myself, is this a coincidence that my two avenues of learning are heading in the same direction or is it that I am the source of it all.  Maybe I’ve always been the source of it all?  Maybe I’ve been the source of Werner Erhard and his transformation on the Golden Gate Bridge (it was just a year after I was born after all)?  Maybe I was the source of the Sustainable Cleveland 2019 initiative, facilitated by my professors from Case, which then led me to find the MPOD program (it was just a year after my declaration of myself as the possibility of the transformation of Cleveland after all)?

Either way, I love having conversations of inquiry to consider the possibilities and make less sense of it all.  It looks like I am the source of my own confusion…and why would I have it any other way?

With Love,

Ed

Loss of Power

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Conversation with another human being is a great way to regain your power when it appears to be lost, assuming there is a degree of rigorous listening present.  It’s one of the reasons I’m grateful to have such an incredible wife because when I really need her to be she’s the source for me.  She grants me the space to speak and in her listening I am recreated and sense-making, as the social constructionists call it, occurs.  Sense is made for me, sense is made for her and we walk away from the conversation with renewed sense of purpose or reinvigorated presence to our existing purpose.

Losing power is aggravating and annoying when you are aware of aletheia as I am.  Knowing that you’re in a vicious circle of story about what happened influencing the way what happens is perceived thereby adding to the story about what happened and on and on (a vicious circle) doesn’t make any difference in getting out of the vicious circle.  Usually it involves spending a lot of time looking inward to try to find the source of “it”…that thing which you know is wrong.  But then, I know that nothing is wrong so I tell myself that everything is exactly as it should be, perfect in this moment, and so I spend time trying to be present to this moment so I can get that everything is exactly as it should be and be present to the miracle that life is.  The more I try to get back to that present moment the less I’m able to get back to it and the more evidence I gather that there’s definitely something wrong.

This shouldn’t be happening to me.  I’m so transformed that I’m writing a book on a unified theory of change.  More evidence that something is wrong.

She was in the shower listening and I felt despair.  I just started talking.  Half of the time she probably wasn’t even listening, even though she was listening, but it was the space she was granting me to just question out loud the possible causes of what was creating this chemical imbalance (as I put it) that had me feeling so disempowered.

I’d examined all the possible causes in the past few days and the more I attempted to identify them the deeper it seemed to get.  It started out that I’d been sick for so long I thought, and that led to me getting better, but continually getting sick.  Then it was the lack of sun caused by this very mild Cleveland winter in which we’ve actually had quite a bit more sun than I’ve ever recalled.  Then it was the impending completion of my MPOD program after next week’s residency and all the work I’ve been actually having to do at my day job.  Then it was the day job in general and the wholesale feeling of despair about being unable to make any difference in the company I work when I’m supposed to be coming out of this program being proficient in organizational change (not to mention I’m writing a book about it).  Then it was the laundromats and the fact that I still haven’t moved on some of the initiatives and then it was this and then it was that.

She mostly just listened.  At times she would echo some of the same sentiments and recreate what I said in her experience.  At times I would cut her off when she would start talking about her experience and she would let me, and I would let her let me because I, for a change, really felt like I had to talk.

Mostly I attempt to position myself in that space, as the space, into which other people can express who they are and generate themselves as who they are.  I find that when I’m caught up in a number of deadlines and doing a lot of things that others are expecting outcomes from, including myself, that I have a more difficult time being that space.  Caught up in doing rather than being.  When it goes on long enough and it doesn’t appear that I’m really making any difference in the world I find myself caught in that place of despair.  It’s great to have a committed listener to let me be and let me be known and let me be heard.  She didn’t actually do anything, or suggest anything, or make anything better.  She just listened.

She granted me power through listening.  We can each do that for each other.  It makes a world of difference.

With Love,

Ed

More on Power

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One of the things that I’ve noticed about Power since writing my last blog entry (interesting how distinguishing something makes it more present to your experience, isn’t it?) is that the different roles I “play” require different forms of power for me to “produce” results.  This is something that I need to continue to get clear about and practice daily to effectively be love present and experienced in all my environments.  It may not always be this way, but what I’ve noticed about love present and experienced is that the form power takes is very much outside of my “self”.  It occurs as an outside power where I am the space where other’s power occurs, I’m the reflection of their power.

Being or “playing” different roles often calls forth what you would expect from that role, given your cultural set or world view for what that role entails.  I am many, many different roles throughout the day and each of them are just that, roles.  I wake up as the role of my self, then I notice who I’m next to and I’m the role of husband and as my kids come down the hall I’m the role of father.  When we all get in the car and pick up the other kids I’m a neighbor, a car pool driver, a law abiding citizen, or not depending on how on time I am.

Two roles that I noticed today were my current job role as an Identity and Access Management Infrastructure Engineer Lead and my job role of the future as Independent Organizational Consultant.  Inside of role #1 (current job role) I was also co-worker, employee, client, and customer to name a few.  Who I was being inside of those job roles was not always the possibility of love present and experienced.  I am still on the hook, and mildly excited, to provide the current solution that I’m currently working on.

Being in the position to get something done as co-worker, client, and customer in my current organizational environment left me calling forth some behavior that doesn’t have anything to do with who I am.  Who I am allows space for other people to be magnificent and I get the opportunity to interact with them as the magnificence that they are, which has a timeless essence to it with no constraint on place or time or even result ultimately.  The result is what’s so in the moment, with perhaps a declared result in the future.

Organizations as designed, with the roles they assign to people seem to draw out behaviors that are more in line with the role than with who the human beings are.  In my role as Infrastructure Engineer Lead the behavior that is drawn out is more in line with my “being smart” attribute developed in the spring of the second grade on the grade school parking lot.  This is an automatic way of being cultivated over many years, similar to my already described way of being funny.  While it is useful to be smart and it works well for me, the aftermath often leaves others being less smart than me.  I am expected to have answers, and most of the time I do.  These answers are right.  Other people’s are wrong.

Opinions and knowledge radiate from my being and they spray the less knowledgeable with their fragments and all the while who I am, though not experienced, is loving people.  When you have a vendor from out of town on site who’s only there for a short time and you need to have a system deployed in a short period of time knowing things “seems” to be more useful than allowing space for others magnificence to occur.  If I let that magnificence occur, and I’m not saying it won’t, my deadline appears to be toast.

Much of this, I assert, has more to do with the organization as it’s designed, and the roles that others are in as those roles are designed, than anything to do with the actual people involved.  It’s as if we’re all puppets being controlled by an invisible hand…not from above, but from below where it’s really difficult to notice.

With the training I’ve had in group development, personal development, being with people, Social Constructionism, Appreciative Inquiry, Complex Responsive Process, Intentional Change Theory, Experiential Learning and Emotional and Social Intelligence I know that I can work through the various layers of organization and all the individuals involved to come to a more fluid working state.  I know that we can come up against the same tasks we’re working on and perform them with grace and with ease and with affinity for each other and ultimately with love present and experienced.

Time and space limit one’s ability to impact the immediate past immediately.  I’m three days into this engagement and at least the first phase of it will continue through the middle of April.  Many of the groups I’m currently working with will have done their part (one way or another) and I may not work with them again for a long time.

Toward the end of the day today I began to consider some different ways of being with people, outside of the role that I normally play.  I began to walk around more and communicate more and be present to people more.  Pretty obvious to me as Organizational Consultant…what else is there.  But within role as Systems Engineer Lead, that’s just not the way things get done and it’s not what people expect.  It’s a strong pull to be what’s expected when you’ve been a role as long as I’ve been this role, but making sense of the day through my other role has given me the opportunity to attempt some radical alterations tomorrow.

I’m going to keep turning this role on it’s ear and see what happens.  Maybe I’ll be in that Independent Consultant role sooner rather than later.  Or maybe I’ll start generating some miracles and love will really be present and experienced.  It is all just experiential learning anyway…as long as I’m open to the learning.

With Love,

Ed

Power

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I’ve been at a loss for a few weeks now about what I really wanted to communicate next.  It’s not that I haven’t had ideas and it’s not that I haven’t started drafts, but they haven’t quite been what was at the forefront of how I wanted you to know me.  After all, it is my intention that this blog is not just a personal space for sharing who I am, or a professional space for creating dialogue with potential clients, rather I intend the blog to accurately reflect all of these things.  If I’m being true to who I am and really being authentic, there will be no difference between personal and professional me.  At the same time some conversations may not seem relevant on one level or the other at least in the current “terministic screen” of social media.  As a reforming technologist, I do believe that someday there won’t be an online me or a real world me, there’ll just be me.

This entry then is about power.  First off, power has scary connotations to it, especially when I tell you that I want more power.  If I want more power, in today’s worldview, it’s implied that I will be drawing power from you leaving you with less power.  This is where being love present and experienced makes a difference in our relationship.  If I have more power, you also have more power.

I want you to know that I want more power.  I want power to share your experience with you so I can be left altered by the offers you’ve made me (as my Improv OD friends would say) and I want power that comes from you allowing me to exist with you within the space that you occupy.  I want power that comes from you granting me gracious listening where I get to be larger than I could have ever known myself to be without your love and power.  With that power and love, you get to be larger than you’ve ever known yourself to be.  This is the kind of power that can only be created within the conversations that we generate with each other.  And given that this blog is a one way dialogue I want to say enough to pique your interest without creating too much of a persona.  In time, we’ll need to speak with each other to create who we are to each other.

Currently I’m reading a book called The Boundaryless Organization about making hierarchical structures more permeable and it speaks to many of the kinds of power that we experience within organizations and the way the existing model of power really limits our ability to be innovative, flexible, quick and integrated within business and how much of this model comes from the natural hierarchy that occurs within families.  It’s an older book, but as usual I’m finding many insights into many of the phenomenon I experience in my day job, in my side businesses, and in my family and other relationships.

Concepts such as Complex Responsive Process and the amazing Patricia Shaw book Changing Conversations in Organizations which I read prior to my Europe trip a couple of months ago were laden with these aspects related to power that I’ve been attempting to articulate in conversations with people for quite some time now.  The groundwork that is laid by the concepts for organizations being nothing more than conversations that have occurred and are currently occurring should be required reading for all human beings.

Obviously, or maybe not so obviously, my first foray into this type of thinking came from my exposure to Werner Erhard’s work when I was nineteen years old.  I have received a great deal of conversational opposition throughout the twenty odd years since I first participated in that conversation from people close and not so close to me and I believe that opposition explains much of my current participation through academia seeking a different way to frame what was so obviously learned from that participation that seemed so difficult to explain.

Power.

I want you to consider that you want more of it.  If you’re alone right now say it out loud.  Go ahead and say it.  “I want power. I want lots of power.”

It’s why we chase status, money, relationship, religion and sometimes when we feel like we’re just not getting what we need we chase things to numb our powerlessness.  When our relationships aren’t working because we don’t have enough power we go outside of them, and when we’re not getting the power we need at work we find new jobs, and when we’re not getting the power to take care of our families we band together and occupy something.

Unfortunately, many of the ways we seek power within our existing worldview are still playing by rules created by the people who have power in that worldview.  I’m fairly certain that I’ve been able to generate some access to power in ways that don’t fall within those rules.  I know they’ve been working for me and I need to start to find out if it’s possible to share those with other people.

If you’re interested in having power and want to have a conversation with me about creating it together send me a message.  I’d love to chat about it.

With Love,

Ed

Socially Constructed Reality

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This story will appear to be about me.  This story is about we.  When we are blind to the context we are born into and nobody makes us aware that no matter how much it appears to be the way it is, and we are all making up the way it is, we are left feeling trapped and not known.  This is a story from my life where I constructed reality and became funny and trapped.

This story occurred when I was three or four years old, maybe one of the earliest incidents that I recall in life.  At this age I would consider my Self as close to a “pure being” as is possible in human form while still having some use of language and memories that I might recall. 

I remember sitting up on the kitchen counter with my Dad who was leaning on the counter next to me drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.  He would occasionally let me have sips of his beer and I recall that he did let me do it this time.  In the next part of the memory, one of his friends, a Cleveland cop, is parked in the driveway in his police cruiser and he and my Dad are talking for some time and drinking more beer while they talk. 

Eventually, I remember coming back into the house through the front door and through the entry foyer with my Dad, and my Mom is in the house, not very happy about something.  What that something is has no bearing on the memory, which is good because I can’t remember what they were fighting about, if I ever knew.  What I do recall is a vivid feeling and desire to explain to them how none of what they are fighting about is important.  What is important is that there is love. 

It would be easy to trivialize this incident and say that I was just a little kid, and I was afraid about my parents fighting, and I wanted to make everything ok.  But the memory is so vivid of the perspective that I was watching them argue from, and thinking, even as a little kid, how foolish they were being, and how they didn’t even know how foolish they were being.  It was not a childish, self-surviving experience of love that I was trying to tell them about, but a deep sense of why we’re all here to bask and relish in the amazing gift of love and space and being that we all are.

Now, I am much older than I was at that time, and I have a much larger vocabulary than I did at that time, and I am so much more worldly than I was at that time, yet those things do not seem to make much difference in my ability to explain or talk about this sense of, or presence of love that I was attempting to express to my parents.  It may be that no words exist to express it fully.

What happened was that I tried explaining it to them and they even stopped fighting for a little bit to give me the opportunity to try to explain it to them, but I didn’t do it any justice and they resumed arguing.  I was left with a sense that no matter what I did I wouldn’t be able to get them to understand, and my parents would continue to fight.  They continued fighting, on and off, until only a few years ago when they finally divorced officially, a year or two after my Dad was diagnosed with some form of dementia.

That day though, I do recall that eventually my parents did stop fighting.  After I had given up explaining to them something that I could not properly describe, I did somehow get them to start laughing with some silly childish method which I don’t remember.  I don’t recall what I did, but it was effective in getting them to stop fighting for a little while.  As a result of that failure to presence love for and with my parents, and the subsequent “good enough to get them to stop fighting” response, I spent a good part of the next 20 years or so perfecting the art of well-timed methods for getting people to laugh, since I couldn’t get them to really understand me. 

Until very recently, I believe that a lot of people that know me would say that I’m pretty funny or have a good sense of humor, but not a lot of people would say that they had a very good sense of who I am.  The way it occurred for me, as a phenomenon, is that the majority of people never had any idea who I really am.

Eventually, all that wise cracking in life, school, and beginning work life started to take its toll and my life had become a lot less promising than it started out to be and was definitely not fulfilling because nobody really knew me and I didn’t know myself.  It was around the time of my 19th birthday that I had my first exposure to a model of integrity that allowed me to realize that I wasn’t really being true to myself.  Just recognizing that altered the course of my life significantly in many ways, and without knowing it I spent the next half of my life seeking that which I couldn’t explain, mostly because I still couldn’t remember that incident from my childhood. 

I did have some luck in explaining that unexplainable sense of love to the woman that would become my wife and we created a relationship and a family based in that. 

A couple of years ago, I took a course at the University of Rochester that had me recall that initial incident or that “break” with my true Self.  Since then, I’ve been living my life coming from that place of love and finding a way to turn that into something meaningful in the world.  After all, it wouldn’t make any sense to me to know the secrets of the universe and not attempt to share them with everybody else. 

This blog is one avenue to expand the presence and the space within which we exist. 

See if you can recall a time in your past, perhaps when you were very young, where you made a decision about yourself and have been living from that decision ever since.  This is a socially constructed reality.  You began by creating that reality with yourself and in time everybody began to know you from that reality.  Today they would tell you, “Yes, that’s just the way you are.”

Maybe it’s not.

With Love,

Ed

Bridging/Correlation

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Consider that the first four posts in this blog – Truth/Love/Aletheia – are the pre-requisite reading for creating the context of our relationship.  Given the wide range of people that I’ve met in my life I have a sense that you’ll be left with a wide range of responses or reactions to the pre-requisite reading.  I don’t intend to speculate on what those reactions may be but I want to provide this entry as a bridge.  This bridge is pre-requisite reading as well.  It begins to create the framework for my expression of being love present and experienced in the world.

Truth/Love/Aletheia just is.  We’ve created the world as we know it today on top of, or from, that existing state of Truth or Love or Aletheia.  It’s quite paradoxical, and that paradox is much of the reason that we can’t often see Truth/Love/Aletheia, that our current world as it appears to us is created from Love.  There appears to be so much hatred and ill will, warfare, and genocide, not to mention non-stop political and social bantering that is primarily aimed at crippling or destroying others just to prove that one point of view is more “right” than the other point of view.  Today these opinions are created not to even prove a point of view but just to drive increased numbers of clicks to increase traffic.  From this fishbowl of reality in which we swim we’re left blind.

One part of the paradox is that you can’t “really” do anything with Truth/Love/Aletheia.  It just is.  It’s a place to come from, if you’re aware of it at all, or in the best case if you’re present to it.  Coming from that place of Aletheia gives you the full spectrum, the entire opportunity set or range of possibilities, of available actions as a human being.  Some evidence of what I’m referring to is pointed to by this research I’ve found on the website for the 2011 NeuroLeadership Summit “In the final session of the 2011 NeuroLeadership Summit, Philip Zimbardo, creator of the renowned ‘Stanford Prison Experiment,’ (www.prisonexp.org) suggested we all have the capacity for evil behaviour—that is far greater than is widely understood – and an equal or greater capacity to be heroes.” View the TED talk at TED.

At the other end of the paradox is that truth/aletheia can’t be proven, it can be pointed to or suggested, but truth occurs for each of us in our own way and in our own experience.  I present the example above only as a pointer for you to begin to inquire and distinguish what is, to unconceal and reveal Aletheia.

Walking around in the world, or as I like to say Being in the world, as the space where Love is present and experienced is a great way to live.  My wife refers to it as me “living in the clouds”, Katrina referred to it as walking on sunshine…but, because it can’t be used for anything I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years studying the experience to fork the jello.  It’s slippery, this particular jello, because the moment you try to do something with it or use it for some purpose or grasp it as an in order to do something else it ceases to be what it is and you end up sliding down the slipperly slope that leaves you with dashed hopes and expectations and dreams which lead to resentment and envy and jealousy usually culminating in hostility, righteousness, warfare or blogging for political gain.

With that in the background I want to point to an orientation that I’ve found to be a useful place to build from Truth/Love/Aletheia.  I’m not proposing this orientation as “the” orientation, or the “right” orientation, it is only an orientation. 

Social Contstruction is a theory (dangerous to use any word to “describe” what it is) or movement (danger) or orientation (danger) that, if used coming from and present to Truth/Love/Aletheia can provide a framework for developing meaningful actions from Truth/Love/Aletheia.  This Bridging/Correlation entry is not intended to explain Social Contruction rather it is intended to be a conversational bridge between the realms of being and doing.  If you are interested in a brief overview this will give you the ten minute rundown (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVVWmZAStn8).  Thank you to the good doctor’s for creating it.

Truth/Love/Aletheia is a state of being, an ontological realm, temporal in nature.  Because of it’s temporal nature it will never be experienced in the future or developed or planned to occur in the future.  For Truth/Love/Aletheia there is no future, there is no past.  There is only right now where Love is experienced as a presence.  It isn’t even really a thing – as soon as I call it Truth, or Love, or Aletheia or Truth/Love/Aletheia it ceases to be present.  Mu.  No-thing.

Experience shows that it can occur as more than just an individual phenomenon however. Truth/Love/Aletheia can occur for groups of people together sharing space.  From and in that space conversation occurs and new social construction and meaning can develop from that place where Love is experienced.

Social Constructionism, understood by groups who are present to Truth/Love/Aletheia can create future realities that seem unlikely or impossible today.

Reality as it will be experienced without any notion of Truth/Love/Aletheia or Social Contructionism can, I assert, take on a shape in the future that is closer to Truth/Love/Aletheia by developing interventions now that alter the range of possible futures by creating social constructed realities from Truth/Love/Aletheia today.

Long ago we created meaning and somewhere along the way we stopped inquiring into that meaning, where it came from, how we decided that this means this and that means that.  A notion of Truth was developed by Plato and Socrates (from what we’ve been told) and we’ve bought it and the conversation goes on and on.  Question Truth from the being you are prior to language.

Let’s create ourselves, our organizations, our world from that place.

With Love,

Ed

How Can I Love You If I Don’t Know You?

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In a previous post I’d mentioned that many people probably react to meeting me, in their heads, with “Yeah, well you don’t know me.” after I’ve explained to them that I love them.  This article will attempt to explain the apparent paradox of loving somebody that I don’t even know.

Most of what we traditionally know about loving another person has been given to us through what we’ve learned in books, or what we’ve heard in love songs, or what we’ve seen in television or movies about love, falling in love, being in love, how torturous love is, etc.  So the first thing about that is that you may want to consider the question of “How did I come to know what it is I think I know?”  And not just in regard to love, but in regard to knowing period.  That’s a topic for another post but in this case, consider the question “How did I come to know what it is I think I know about love?”

As mentioned above there are a number of sources of this knowledge.  You may have witnessed or experienced love from your parents, other people’s parents, family, friends, God, movies, TV, books, love songs, sad love songs.  Perhaps you’ve “fallen in love” as we like to say in our culture.  You just knew that you loved that person because of the way they made you feel, or said more accurately, the way you felt when they were around.

Maybe you both shared common interests such as competitive kick-ball, or eating sloppy joe’s by candlelight.  Because of this common interest you knew you loved that person.  Certainly you’ve had friends that you’ve loved and you knew you loved them because they thought similar things as you, or were there to pick you up when you were down, maybe they helped you get over that other person that you loved so much.

What I’m not about to do is to tell you that those things aren’t love.  They may or may not be.  What I am about to tell you is that love is much more simple than that.  Love is much more simple than that.

Love just is.  The reason it shows up in all those examples above is because it’s already there and in those situations you’re open to it.  You’re willing to receive love as a presence and then you experience love.  Now, there are cases where you continue to call something love because love used to be present as an experience and it isn’t present anymore.  Often that experience comes in the form of somebody breaching the integrity of the relationship.

So what?  Right?  I mean really what’s the point here.

The point is that I’m an opening for love being present and experienced.  Sometimes I’ll get hurt being this way, I know, because there’s no better way to get hurt than to make oneself entirely vulnerable with another who is unwilling to make themself equally vulnerable.  It’s worth the risk.  Often, what shows up is people’s magnificence.  Sometimes it takes a while, I do occasionally have rough patches and I find myself closing down, not willing to be vulnerable anymore.  Then I notice that my life is quite a bit less grand than it used to be.

What I do in those situations is identify what is covering over or concealing love.  It’s not so much that I have to do anything, because it’s there whether I uncover or unconceal it or not, but I can’t experience it when something is in the way of it being present.  Usually I’m holding on to something and unwilling to let it go, or not saying something that I need to say, or I was expecting something to happen that didn’t.  Once I say it, or let it go, or give it up love is present.

Given that, when I used to meet people, I used to wait for something from them to indicate that I could or should love them.  Rarely would I get it from them.  As soon as I gave that up and just started loving them that’s what started to happen.  Love would happen.  Sometimes it takes a while for their reality to match mine, sometimes it never does, but my reality is so beautiful.  Imagine loving everybody you meet.

Then love everybody you meet.

With Love,

Ed

If We’d Met Previously

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There are many people that I’ve met in life prior to knowing “who I am” and as a result I may not have been true to myself and very likely, not true to you.  Now, there are many people, those that I hold closest to my heart who were able to get to who I am anyway.  These people are generally my family, my closest friends, and even others who’ve known me even though I didn’t know myself.  This entry is not about them, it’s about all the others who I haven’t spent enough time with for you to get to know me and me to know you.

For those people, the first order of business is most likely an apology.  Now, I wasn’t always a jerk to you prior to my knowing who I am, but the odds were increased considerably that at one point I may have been.  So, I apologize.  I hope that you’ll consider this apology deeply and accept it with my promise to be true to myself, to uphold my word regarding who I am, and to begin again with you.  After all, I know now that I love you.  That you’re perfect exactly the way that you are and exactly the way that you are not.  Even if you don’t forgive me.

However, if you’ve read my apology and you’ve gotten all your questions answered about it, and who I may have been that had me being the way I was in our relationship previously, and you understand who I am now and that I can say with utmost integrity that it is who I am, and you can’t or won’t accept my apology we may be better off parting ways.  To maintain the relationship in that state is to hold the past in place, to not allow me to be who I am in the eternal now (and now, and now, and now).  I can be ok with that.  But what I can’t be ok with, is you continuing to be who you were for me when I was who I was.  Not forgiving and not letting that go holds who you were in place as much as it holds me in place.  I know that you’re much more than that.

There are some of you out there and we’d only “met” in passing.  There’s the guy in the parking lot at Peaches Record Store in Old Brooklyn when I was about 8 years old who drove by and asked me, “What are you looking at”?  Or those kids that asked me if I wanted to go to Jim’s house because, as you said, you were going to go beat him up. There are also countless people I’ve passed in the hallways at work, or high school, or just out on the street.  We had the opportunity, for one brief moment, to really be together.  To take just a second out of what I was reflecting about and be with you, and share some space, and some time, and some love…that’s what I apologize for.  That I wasn’t present enough to create that for the both of us to share.  Me in your world and you in mine.  Just for a moment.

There are others that I’ve met where no apology may be necessary.  I may have been known to you as “that funny guy”, or that “really smart guy”, or that really persistent boyfriend who just couldn’t let it go, or that kid who was so competitive that even when you won you felt like you lost.  But I was never really mean to you, not really. To you, the apology is still offered but it’s more of an apology for not really and fully getting to be with you.  I was, essentially, a front or a mask or a facade.  I mean, parts of the real me may have come out, but mostly I was pretty busy protecting myself (from what now, I don’t know).  I wasn’t really authentic with you.  Sure, I was funny and I told you the truth as I knew it, but it wasn’t coming from the place where truth comes from.  It was coming from the place where people come from when they’re trying to protect themselves and survive.

I’m over that now.  And I’d like to reintroduce myself to you.

“Hi, my name is Ed Malinowski, I have 3 kids and an amazing wife, and I work as an organizational consultant and coach.  But what I really want you to know about me is that I just love people.  So I want you to know that you don’t have to be any particular way with me, and that I already love you.  I love you exactly the way you are and exactly the way you’re not.  And, I want you to know that I know that you love me too, whether you know it or not, and it’s ok either way.”

It may be a little strange interacting with me now since some of the “ways of being” I’ll be won’t be what you’re used to or expecting.  But I’d like you to consider that those weren’t me anyway and from how I was being you weren’t you either. 

And if we pass in the hall, you may wonder what I’m so happy about, or you may get the feeling that I know something that you don’t know or that I’m up to no good.  That’s just me present to love, with you.  Strange as it may seem.

The true gift that comes from me being who I am is that you get to be who you are.  I can’t wait to meet you.

With Love,

Ed