Tag Archives: Aletheia

Not Everything Can or Should Be Broken Down to 5 Easy Steps

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Tips abound on drawing traffic to your blog, or your web site or your garage sale.  They show up as advice to break things down into bite sized chunks, come up with the top 4 and a half ways to do something lists…keep them short.  I’ve read these “6 simple steps to be an amazing leader that people will follow through the top 7 obstacles your company will face”, “8.5 methods to cure your urinary tract infection”, “3.1 methods to make Windows Phone better than the iPhone” articles and some of them are posted on very reputable literary forums. I’ve been distracted and hooked by them by my lizard brain looking for that quick fix to whatever ails me.  But the Truth/Love/Aletheia about it, if you’re willing to do the work and uncover, unconceal and get to what lies at the heart of life is that not everything can be broken down and resolved in 5 easy steps.

Admittedly, my blog entries are wordy.  Some of them go on and on and I love it.  I write as much for me as for you, as we are really one in the same.  I’m also not interested in the short term change effort, the one that will satisfy me for a little while only to have the root issue, dilemma, problem, dysfunction, or organizational malformation resurface later.  Some of the concepts I want to put out there are emerging after quite a number of years of reflection and there really isn’t a short form way to express them.  Many of the diagrams and applications that I am developing need the form created by language first to accurately depict them to enable their graphical form to take shape, rather than creating the graphic first to cause misinterpretation about what the graphic is intending to say.

Most of the 5 easy steps to “fix” things are based in the inherent illusion that something’s wrong that needs to be fixed in the first place.  Really getting to the bottom of that illusion will be an ongoing underlying theme in these pages due to the persistent nature of that illusion. An unconcealing.  Change is an emergent phenomenon which means sometimes you have to let what is be, and let what’s happening happen.  And watch.  Inquire.  Make sense of.

This may, however, mean that I may not become the most popular blogger on the web.  If my aim were popularity, virality, clicks, retweets, and flash mobs of glory about my cardboard arcade (a really cool story by the way) then I will most likely fail in my ambition.  My ambition is already complete however.  It is no less than having love be present so that it may be experienced right now. (Are you experiencing that you are loved?  You little devil you…)

There are no 5 steps to removing all the barriers that human beings put up around themselves, to protect themselves, and make themselves look good (because they’re so afraid of what people may think of them if they look mad, bad or wrong).  There aren’t 3 ways to make your Organizational Change go perfectly and make you look like the brilliant beast that you are.  There aren’t 7.5 things you can do to be in this moment, not like a concept but as a phenomena, that allow you to experience all the manifested glory that each of us is – even if doing so will have leadership be a natural expression for you.  It takes some work, some reflection, some inquiry, some practice and experimentation.  Sometimes it even gets a little messy and doesn’t turn out the way you want it to.  If you can bypass your judgement just long enough to let the experience settle in, you’ll unconceal some of the Aletheia and experience perfection.  What’s there, if you look, will be love.

With Love,

Ed

Get Over Yourself

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I’ve just finished reading the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad.  I only read it because somebody mentioned to me that the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” guy recommends laundromats as a place to start for building wealth, and, it just so happened to be in my wife’s audible book queue.  I don’t remember if I put it there, or she put it there, but it was there, it was short, and I wanted to hear what he had to say about laundromats.  He didn’t say anything about laundromats.  It was an easy listen, and inspiring at times, a little hostile at others but overall it covered a lot of the things that I’d like to make sure my kids understand about money – mainly that money is a conversational construct.  This isn’t a book review for that book, however.

Get rich infomercials at night, people blogging and hawking different “new and better” ways of viewing the world, self-help books, Self-help books, transformational seminars, positive psychology and just about anything that involves selling or marketing something tend to bring up an automatic defense mechanism for many people.  I know they do for me.  “Here they go”, I think to myself as they secretly try to not tell me that they want me to join their multi-level marketing scheme which certainly must work for some people or they wouldn’t continue to exist.  I generally tolerate them enough to sort of watch them squirm through the agony of trying to sell me on something, letting them be with themself as a salesman and be with me as a customer.  I’m not much of a salesman myself and I certainly bring up plenty of defense mechanisms for many people, mostly because I can be abrasive, and rude, and disrespectful and fairly focused on myself.  Complaining is definitely evidence of that focus since most of the complaints have a “how the world is affecting me” air to them.

Complaining seems to be something that I’m just thrown toward.  I’ve had nicknames such as “the b*tch” because of incessant complaining about things at places I’ve worked, I think I always feel tired so I’m generally a complaint about that, and I seem to want to control things around me – though I think this is more of a recently developed phenomenon than something that’s been going on my whole life (or am I just conscious enough to notice it now?).  Either way, this post isn’t about that either yet I did want to point it out so it doesn’t appear as if I’m deluded about my thrown-way-of-being in the world.  I got it…I like to complain (usually when things are out of my control).

Something that I’ve noticed about complainers, through this recently revealed view of myself and through viewing other people who complain, is that they’re really committed to something.  Additionally, while complaints often have the appearance of being about me, or about “one”, they often point to some greater injustice outside of the self – and I use the term injustice very tongue in cheek.  Taking the Appreciative Inquiry approach to complaints and finding the “unconditional positive question” (http://portal.kessels-smit.nl/files/02_Interview_With_David_Cooperrider.mp3) to that complaint opens a portal into that person’s deep commitment to something.  That’s not all that this post is about either, the complainers that are committed to something.

What is this post about.  Well, certainly, love.  That’s all it’s all about – Truth/Love/Aletheia.

Practically, what it’s about is my declaration that I’m over myself.  So listen up and get ready to relate to me in a way that may be new to you, may make you uncomfortable, may just get in your face and make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, may make you realize what me really being abrasive is like, and may just have you get what truth/love/aletheia is.

Aside from the practical part, the part about me being over myself, this post is about you.  You quiet non-complainers, or super secret back office complainers, you who are so resigned that your complaints are muffled by sarcasm.  You fine people, or even better, sarcastically great people.  I really don’t know what to say to have you be straight, to stop pretending, to stop putting on the good face and start saying it like it is for you.

These infomercial guys, these authors, these transformation experts – why are they always trying to get you to do something?  Buy their product, read their book, take their course…now I won’t speak for all of them as certainly you’ll be cautious and driven by fear (can you help yourself?) and you’ll find some of them to be completely in it for themselves and struggling and miserable trying to fix what’s wrong.  But there are others, some of them out there, that are doing what they’re doing completely for you.  They write, and they promote, and they sell because they know it will make a difference for you.  They’ve done it, they’ve gotten over themselves and proven enough to themselves for their satisfaction that they’ve made it.  They got this.

Let me put it another way.  Recently I came to the conclusion that I’m done “living my life to the fullest”.  For the past twenty years or so I have been living life “from death” – realizing that my time is short here and each minute is precious and in the end they are going to lower my lifeless corpse into a hole and throw dirt on it.  I’ve studied and learned and had amazing experiences and dug deep to fully understand Heidegger’s statements such as, “When resoluteness has been ‘thought through to the end’ in a way corresponding to its ownmost tendency of Being, to what extent does it lead us to authentic Being-towards-death?”.  Then, I’ve attempted to take those learnings into practice and live them and create results “Being-in-the-world”.  I’ve studied being appreciative, and intentional change, and I’ve had plenty of experiential learning.  I declare myself complete.  My life is full. (Don’t hear this as I’m done learning, or growing, or inquiring into – oh, no not that). It always has been and my results indicate it.  Even the failures indicate it.  The truth only revealed itself after I gave up the lie however.  It’s a full life and I’ve done many things beyond what I’ve ever imagined possible.  Still I’m afraid, living within my own constraints.

Strangely, what I’m afraid of now is sounding like I’m bragging.  Being concerned that people will hold it against me if I tell the story of how great my life is or target me to try to knock me off of my pedestal.  Even while I have some really messed up things happening in my life, it’s still incredible.  Rather than buying into that fear I’m going to push it out there anyway, full disclosure, like I said.

My approach will shift ever so slightly.  Instead of living my life as if each day may be my last, I’m going to begin living my life as if each day may be your last.  My last “full encounter” with my Dad before he slipped off into speechlessness is the kind of example I’m talking about.  Being present and with you fully so the depth of our connectedness reveals itself even though our relationship is brief and in passing, or has not been this way until now.  Now, there are times when relating to my own life, and living it to the fullest, where I slipped into unconsciousness…and I’m allowing for that I probably will slip into unconsciousness living your life to the fullest as well.  However, being with you, in your world as if your life depends on it is my purpose.  It always has been – love present and experienced for each and every, now, demands it.  I can’t love you fully until you can love yourself fully and I know you don’t.  It’s why you’re afraid, why you’re resigned, why you’re cynical…it’s why I don’t get any life from you when we converse.

Noticing the truths that you dodge, and the ways that you put up with things, and the ways you’re resigned to “That’s just the way it is” and letting them slip by unnoticed, unmentioned – those days are over.  You want to talk about abrasive.  Now, I’ll do my best to be gentle, and I’ll promise to recognize if you’re just not open to it – some people are a flat out denial that This is it!  I’m ok with that…I’m not going to push it and I have no attachment to your waking from your slumber, yet I’m at least going to let you know.

Why blog about this?  Why put it out there, and annoy people with it via facebook?  Just be that, right?  Here’s the thing about all those infomercial dudes, and the people who want you to come to their thing – the ones who’ve made it – they really just want to share what they got with you.  They’ve seen that there is something concealed, hidden from our view, that’s so simple and so attainable.  So freeing, and joyous and fleeting.  Sharing it, and unconcealing for other people is the easiest way to keep it from getting concealed.  It covers over so easy you see…this truth, this aletheia.  Like cities in the desert in a sandstorm…buried.  The concealed truth is that you got this too.  You’re brilliant, vibrant and can be or do or have anything you want in your life.  I know because I am in mine and I’ve met enough people that are in theirs.  You just have to be willing to let go of the one thing stopping you from having it all.  The belief that you don’t.

You’re going to die, they’re going to put your body in a hole, and throw dirt on it.  Maybe they’ll just burn it to ashes.  What do you want your life to be about before that happens?  Visualize your body vaporizing as flame consumes it…what will you wish that you’d have done?  What are you afraid of?  What are you protecting?  Reveal it and I will love you.  Don’t reveal it and I will love you.  The only difference is, one way you experience that I love you, the other way you’re afraid and unlovable.

With Love,

Ed

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

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

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

When we meet

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Someday we may meet in person.  When we do it’s possible that I’ll introduce myself to you this way.  “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.”

Who introduces themself that way?  First of all, you should read About the Author.  But if that doesn’t explain it, I’m sure there will be plenty of posts around the topic of love that will shed some light on the Why of it.  For now, just suffice it to say that even though we haven’t met I love you.

Now, not a lot of people comment on my introduction.  I don’t really know what people think about it.  Probably most of them think, somewhat secretly, “Yeah, well you don’t know me.”  I’m sure there are a fair amount of people that believe I’m fairly disingenuous.  Either that or if they have no impetus to continue to work (or play) with me, they’ll just disregard what I said and disregard me. But I swear to you that it is possible to love complete strangers and that I do it all the time.

Before we get too far down the path, I want to clearly distinguish that love and sex are very undistinguished in our society.  So no, I’m not talking about sex at all.

However, I’ve done a lot of work over the years, deep reflection, development of emotional intelligence, and reflection on what it is to be a human being and as a result I’ve gotten fairly close to a state of truth (hence truth/love/aletheia), at least for a few fleeting moments, of the very nature of reality.  And what I’ve come up with is that all there really is, the water we swim in each and every day, is love.

We spend the majority of our days blind to it and pretty much missing the point.  But that’s the reason why I’m here, to remind everybody.

This blog, is one avenue of approach.  You don’t have to believe what I say here.  All I ask is that you read it, and consider.

With Love,

Ed

Why Truth/Love/Aletheia?

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Why my ridiculous obsession with love?  Here’s what Viktor Frankl says about it:  “For the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth; that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.  Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart; the salvation of man is through love and in love.”