Three Answers to What is a Life's Work?
My Acceptance Speech for Doctorate honoris causa. from University International Cooperation, Costa Rica,
University International Cooperation, Costa Rica,
Acceptance Speech for Doctorate honoris causa.
Dear Graduates, Faculty, and other guests,
Before today, I had four degrees, having attended three universities. I have also taught as a lecturer, assistant faculty member, or guest speaker at over 27 universities in dozens of countries around the world. So, I asked myself what I thought was important on the occasion of completing academic work and transitioning to using some new knowledge in the world. Graduating to what?
From Knowledge to Understanding:
First, in order to make a great contribution, I was to change from being informed and credentialed to appreciating the core purpose of Regenerative Education. Which is to engage others to seek to understand the working of life before we act! My study was not to accumulate knowledge and share knowledge. Regeneration is about living systems and how they work as a system, alive and dynamic, and evolve the system’s capacity to carry out each role for the system as a whole to actualize. I must move from working with knowledge and producing actions with it to examining it in a system working in life and living. My new knowledge will be quickly outdated and has barely been vetted yet by me. Mostly just transferred.
If it is to be examined and the received knowledge tested, I am at a beginning. I have to learn to image each role at work with other roles and what the core process of the system is for the whole. Not the parts, which is how we are taught. Different faculty, theories, and practices. Fragments. So, I need to make it taboo to move into actions, solutions, or answers. I am at the beginning of the Working Of Living Systems, not the end.
Regenerative Education: The core purpose is to move from knowledge acquisition to understanding the workings of living systems. We are unlikely to have done that in school. It is not to come up with solutions prior to deep understanding. That is our tendency as graduates.
From Hubris to Humility
Secondly, the Core Capability for understanding is Humility over Hubris. Knowledge without understanding promotes Hubris and the Arrogance that often accompanies it. It is so easy to think of ourselves as having completed something and having achieved a new status. But if we do, we enter a blind alley for our own deep understanding and become of little use to ourselves, to others, and particularly to an evolving dynamic world that needs our participation but not from ignorance of understanding.
We quickly and easily seek to be experts and authorities, promote our answers as best practices, and stop listening to how ‘living systems’ work. Not knowledge about Nature. Nature is a ‘human-centric’ term about OUR ecosystem or names for aspects of it. To understand the workings of Life as a process, we use a different process. There is no such thing as an expert. Even the knowledge we have is incomplete, filled with errors, and unexamined. We become competitive with others over who is right. It would be best if we worked on becoming skilled at unlearning, paradigm-shifting, and imaging each system we feel stewardship for as alive and entangled as quantum science says. Learn to see ‘action at a distance’, how a system moves indirectly. What is at the core of its work to be healthy long before we concoct new answers or solutions? Make Einstein proud and develop a new worldview or understanding before we project our worldview and human-centered ideas onto a system we only see with our senses, not as a working whole and living being.
Make a Promise Beyond Ableness to Understand One Thing
Third. We too easily get practiced at keeping notes on things we pick up. ‘Be a lifelong learner’ is the axiom. Continuous knowledge accumulation. It is fun and highly associated with being smart. It builds a career because one can know more about a field than others. You can know a lot but understand very little without transforming your way of learning. My Mohawk grandfather told me that it was not a valid guiding idea. The wise person sees themselves as dedicated to one subject that, if understood, would change their life and, potentially, the world. I eventually named this key process of intelligence as Long Thought Thinking.
It was evident early in my life I wanted to understand how change happened. On an individual scale and a global scale. And I have written, evolved, taught, traveled, and studied all my life on this one question. It is the through-line of my life. From 6 years old, when I understood what racism was and that my father was extremely racist, I wanted to know how to help him change. To see things differently. When I was at UC Berkeley, I gravitated toward a Visiting Scholar named Thomas Kuhn, who had just published a book, The Structure of the Scientific Revolution, on paradigm shifts. Then, I spent 3 years working in South Africa in the 1990s to help businesses fulfill the changes required in the New South African Constitution, where that was still my question. How can change, paradigms, truth, and world views evolve? I have written seven books so far, not because I knew the answers but because it was the best way to examine the questions and get perspective. I believe writing to make sense of how things work is the best form of scientific method, not a lab or survey.
These are some premises I formed about how to use my long-thought thinking after I was ‘graduated.’
Some errors in Long Thought Thinking:
· Long-thought thinking is not toward an endpoint, where progress leads us to truth, solutions, and answers. It is more like beginner’s mind, over and over, where you assume you don’t know much yet and have to start over, repeatedly.
· It is not seeking progressive “knowing”, but really about seeing something ‘at work;’ success is a direction and not guaranteed. But that is not the point.
· Intrinsic transformation is needed before external change is possible. One cannot unknow something you understand but can forget knowledge you have acquired.
· To have understanding, it requires affirming will to change our mind and restrain being attached to hard won knowing, versus receptive will to acquire external knowledge. That is why it is called “received wisdom.”
· Ego is helpful to knowledge; it is a hindrance to understanding.
· Knowledge tends to be fragmented in today’s education, research, and strategizing. Understanding requires seeing Whole Systems (Persons, Places, Processes) at work.
· Understanding is experienced in three centers (intellectual, emotional, and moving centers (i. e. experiential, lived experience examined); knowledge is one aspect of the intellectual center.
· We can gain knowledge in bursts— of days, weeks or a few schooling years, But understanding can only happen with immersion, through time.
· Exception to above: Inner Knowledge about how we work calls on a lifetime of self-study.
Process of long thought thinking
1. Select one or two entangled subjects of great importance to humanity and likely all living systems. It has recurring layering of shifts in worldview on it that must be reconciled.
2. You dedicate your life to understanding it because it matters to so many.
3. Begin to add knowledge, being clear with yourself, that it is understanding’ in a field that can and is urgent to advance humans' work in the world.
Continue: It calls for a person to deepen their thinking every time the person approaches the subject to work on it. We demand ourself to get beyond our tendency to be mentally laziness; to settle for the same answer on the same subject when speaking to others, to be actually ‘thinking’ (or as David Bohm called it, overcoming thoughting), guard against automatic-ness creeping in. We demand ourself to see a new perspective or framework, every time, everytime, we start to speak or write again about that subject. Never do anything the same way twice on that subject. I never repeat workshops, power points, definitions. I start fresh each time. Referencing our past thoughts and attachments to our certainties, makes one lazy. I have never written this speech before. So many new thoughts.
Remember: See that our past and current thoughts, are becoming devoid of life unless new insights are constantly found to renew their relevance in this time, place, and field of energy.
The power of change became my long-thought-thinking endeavor. I wish you to take on an impossible question that you feel is yours to dedicate your life to revealing. Or at least start watching for it. Gurdjieff, an Armenian philosopher offered the question, “what is it that the Universe most needs as the next step in it evolutionary process, that you are most called to advance for Life.
Thank you for this great honor. And Congratulation on the 30th Anniversary of this groundbreaking institution.