Yesterday was a beautiful day and I had an enthusiastic conversation over lunch with a colleague who has read my blog. We shared conversation about our “most enlightened” experiences and our interest and desire to have enlightened being occur “more often”.
Conversation is a fun, if not limiting, way to presence shared experience or the separate experience that comes from that shared place of who we all are. We set off to lunch with an anticipated shared sense of commonality, an anticipation that we each mentally knew some of the same things and even that we had individually experienced some type of heightened state of being or being present.
Common language allows for a common way of describing the same things and knowing that another “gets” what you’re saying. Often it’s the lack of shared language that freaks people out in conversations that are fear inducing such as the ones that confront your ego. In a powerful three part series of papers on rhetoric, Dave Logan from USC goes into great depth about these “terministic screens” and the way dual degree MD and MBA candidates were able to translate their medical practice into results in the financial world because of their ability to distinguish these two very distinct language vocabularies. Having these dual terministic screens gave them the ability to powerfully distinguish things from each realm and tie the two together to make the other more useful. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=915321
During lunch with this “dual track” colleague of mine, who is both a long time network engineer in the Cisco Systems sense of the term, and a student of transformation/enlightenment/Buddhism/etc., I was pleased to have him suggest a model of viewing our existence in the exact same way as I was recently thinking and viewing it – through my similar dual terministic screen of vocabulary and modeling. It’s not that it really IS this way, but it’s a way of viewing it that allowed each of us to share the idea and the experience in a way that each of us understood.
Understanding networks and the way they work requires knowing the OSI model. If you’ve ever studied networking or ever wanted to one of the first things you’ll need to learn is the OSI model – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model. In simple terms, the model defines 7 layers of the network beginning at the lowest level with the “Physical” layer and moving up through the other six layers to the highest level which is the “Application” layer. This model defines and allows various distinctions and interpretations to occur at the various layers – each within its own bounds but each complying to various rules that allow the other layers to interact in an expected way. Certain flexibility but very specific rules. Each with it’s own protocols and ways of interacting with the layer both directly above and directly below it.
His suggestion (had he thought of it this way before, or did my listening allow for and create it in the moment in conversation?) that there is an OSI model for our existence as human beings was fantastic. We talked about our moments of enlightenment and how these occurred almost “below” the physical layer that we believe we interact with and we talked about how our allowing ourselves to come from and interact with more power from this Being layer allowed our applications or our Doing in the world to produce different results. We also talked about people we’ve read or experienced and their unattachment to the various “higher” layers and that this unattachment allowed them to virtually shift the way “reality” occurred for those in their presence.
Mostly though I was just pleased that I was drawing out people around me that were willing to share their experience. It is only through this conversation of network nodes that further realization of our human potential will occur. Connected by dark matter, or being, or presence, or time and space, or whatever it is that we don’t yet know how to describe because we’re way up at the application layer, so far removed from the physical layer that we don’t speak in the same protocols, shouldn’t prohibit us from experimenting and reaching out to converse with each other openly and admitting that we may not really understand how it all works. We know that there’s something there, connecting us all, maybe it’s Truth and Love or whatever words your terministic screens allow for, yet for now it’s mostly concealed behind the veil. We get glimpses of it out of the corner of our eye or when we’re letting go of attachment to things. Join me in unconcealing, leave a comment, send me a note, have a conversation to explore – maybe you’ll expose the next human facebook riding at the application layer. Maybe you’ll just experience Light and Beauty, Freedom, Truth and above all things Love.
With Nothing And Love,
Ed