Logos and Leadership
Logos and Leadership
Logos develops a connotative sense of a recognition of reality for what reality truly is; deepened understanding of the rational principle underlying reality. LINK
Over the years, over the past 20 years, I have often thought of an overheard simple exchange that changed how I think about the world. This exchange came at the end of a communal sitting with the Dali Lama in Chennai, India.
After an hour of engaging with the audience, the Dali Lama opened the floor for questions. I recall none but one. A participant asked, “What frightens you the most about the potential for the next Dali Lama not to be identified prior to your death?” In the milliseconds between the question and his response, I anticipated his response. This, however, was not his response.
His response was immediate. He spoke with sincerity as he described what would be his greatest concern, the loss of the language of his faith. He went on to describe that it was a language that was precise in how it described the emotions of humans. He continued by sharing that if one is not able to name the emotion then one cannot adequately understand the emotion and if one cannot understand the emotion one does not know the man. I only later learned that there is not one language of the Buddhist faith. This challenged me and like my earlier post (E Pluribus Unum), I realized that out of many, one: Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan.
I think about this often as I navigate the world. The language I have. The language I use. The language others have. The language they use. The opportunities and limitations of language implicitly and explictly form. The language that is merely representative versus the language that is lived-- the former an aspiration; the latter a state. When I visualize this understanding, I see far-reaching depths without end and lines that form both interiors and exteriors both smooth and jagged. I want to see where I situate myself. I want to know where others are.
I can't help but think that this is at the heart of what is necessary to co-exist and to co-create as community: to lead within community-- the ability to hear and to understand; to speak and to be understood. And I can't help to think that to truly understand one must be present and to be present one must be evolved; evolved enough to recognize where and why and how communities function as they do-- what motivates, what inspires, what moves intention to progress through change. This awareness motivates me, inspires me, and moves me to sharpen my intention through my own personal journey.
To actively engage in experience to work towards what is currently beyond with what is currently available, I chose to write about what it is I was noticing that caused me to see differently. The journey began with reflections that became posts about the theories and ideas that underpin Integral Theory, from AQAL, to Developmental Lines, to Spiral Dynamics. They include weavings through Tweets, diving into references, and exploring recommendations. It has been a journey that I recall with continued interest. Yet there was something that was challenging me. I write to think and to think, I write. I love how the ideas slowly form through my fingertips, as I peck at keys and see how words create shape to ideas. It's deeply personal, yet this is who I am-- who I have always been.To transcend, one is challenged to experience differently. I wanted to share my learning visually as words for me have shape and create contours, but I did not have a way to do this on my own.
I asked a friend and colleague if he would consider listening and transforming my current understanding into a representation that presented itself through art. He is a friend that I enjoy sitting next to, knowing that our conversation will slowly rise and gently fall into areas of cerebral curiosity. Where thoughts and attempts at expression create a resonance that offers inertia to discrete ideas to travel forward with no destination in sight- a holon making its way into a holarachy.
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Over the course of an hour and a half, I shared the ideas and their meanings inside my head. The ideas and meanings I share in my most recent posts. He listens as he paints. There was no preparation. No discussion of color. No discussion of medium. He came to the experience present. This is was he created.
This is what he shared (in text) and what I shared (in italics):
There's a certain type of geography, that is emerging on the canvas as you paint, because of the surface layers. If you were to cut through them, you would see multiple layers or multiple paintings that have been built upon. And yet you still see some of them coming through in the back there, and it's, we use the analogy of geography because it's a lot like when you see something like the Grand Canyon or even on a smaller scale something like that where part of the land has broken away, and you see those layers of history. Coming through, yet here's the top layer of where you're at now. And the top layer can't be there without those lower layers, and the top layer has potential still for more movement more change. And that's still part of the unknown. This is where I see this painting being at, because we started it, and at the beginning I was just trying to work through some of the concepts that you were talking about with the four quadrants and the I and the we and being able to traverse through those things with different experiences that we have and trying to visualize that you know and not consciously not wanting to be representational and doing that, just trying to use movement, trying to use color trying to use shape to represent those things but then also unify them.
"...the inter- and intra- dependency of each, each independent, all necessary, but not enough."
I see this now, almost like a, like the way the paint strokes have been put in. And with the dripping and things that it's almost like been woven, I hate that. And for those, those spaces that, that the weeping leaves holes that there are, there there those drippy more liquidy. Parts of paint that fill those holes in order for it to all hold together.
"That's beautiful. I mean, It's beautiful. It's beautiful visually and how you described it is, is equally beautiful."
Thank you. Now this was a really interesting painting experiment for me too, so I appreciate you asking and having setting that up to happen. When I look at this kind of thing, I start to see things like this little window here. I really love those moments in the painting. Moments. This is probably my favorite one right now because it's got the most development, but I can see, I can actually see those layers that I was talking about in that little window. Whereas, they're less developed up here, but as the painting goes if I were to work on this I think for like six hours for example, there would be a lot more of those that emerge and disappear. And maybe these shapes change too. And ultimately you end up with something that at the moment I don't have a clear vision on what it would be. And so this as you work through it. You kind of follow the paint's lead and and being as decisive as I can to not let the paint become mud, because it's so easy for this to happen if you simply just mix colors together... I don't want that to happen.
"I am thinking differently. It's like, each piece has similar qualities and it is the distinction of those qualities that makes me think differently."
Yeah, I mean even as, like, like there was a lot of, sort of, not so conscious decisions and then some conscious ones like I remember putting yellow in each corner as you were talking about that at the beginning, and then losing the yellow to green and then the green sort of morphing into this blue. And then these red spaces in there now that I'm looking at it, are kind of like the four corners, they're not. They're not exactly in the corners but is what's perhaps that center of gravity.
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