Utopias

Creating Quality Communities

◦Peter M. Senge was a faculty member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management when he wrote Creating Quality Communities. Here are gleanings:

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We are losing ourselves as fields of dreams. [Talk for yourself,man.] To regain our balance, we must create alternative ways of working and living together.

Learning is dangerous. [So is life].

Currently, two "practice field" projects are underway: dialogue projects and learning laboratory projects. Dialogue projects focus directly on the deeper patterns of communication that underlie whatever issues are being confronted.

Practice fields [are] a place where teams meet to reflect on structures, identify counterproductive behaviors, experiment with alternative strategies, and design solutions for actual work settings. The core of the projects [can be] systems thinking.

[Adequate] learning [finds] no place. Thus we are losing the spaces to dance with the ever-changing patterns of life. We need to invent a new learning model for business, education, health care, government, and family.

◎ The splendid project does not go against all family needs.

Utopia Dealings

Consider that in yoga as elsewhere, truthfulness (including sincerity) is said to be indispensable for great, spiritual progress, and that it also forms the basis of the Satya Yuga, or Golden Age.

So the Utopia life requires more and better than mere landscaping, organisation of people, and architecture. It is a matter of the heart too, like truthfulness. That does not mean that truthfulness cannot backfire or always give good results on earth, though. You should also be on your guard, and could benefit throughout life from keeping your "inner sensing" intact and evaluate the situations too and those involved, to get a way out with enough aplomb somehow - if that can be done.

The troubles that come your way, may not all be the results of your own wrongdoings, past and present. Some are due to wrongdoings and rabid ways of others - for example those that exploit others for money and power and together have brought the earth to the brink of future disasters.

The need for utopias that benefit good families is overly great.

"Now I Have Seen It All."

The British lord chancellor Thomas More (1478-1535) strove to fulfil some high dreams by concepts that went into a thought-of, ideal community to realise. He called it Utopia. That good man was beheaded. But before that happened, he battled for his ideals in his way:

In Utopia Thomas More recommended that young people should see each other naked before marriage in order to avoid disappointments and recriminations later.

Sir William Roper came early one morning to More's house at Chelsea with a request to marry one of his daughters. More led him upstairs to the room where the two young girls were sleeping. They were lying on their backs, with the sheet lightly over them. Their father whipped off the sheet. The startled girls awoke and turned quickly over onto their stomachs.

"Now I have seen both sides," said Sir William, and then and there chose the elder daughter, Margaret. [Fadiman 1985, "Thomas More"]

◎ deals that are not lived out, may not be worthwhile.

A Norwegian author who did not win the Nobel prize in literature, Arne Garborg, wrote wistfully of a land of elves in the west – an object of wistful yearnings that appears in Norwegian folklore.

The Atlantis that Plato writes about, was a place where fit living supposedly was within reach for many, if not all. Solon was told Atlantis stories in ancient Egypt – and from there many data appear to clash with and combat each others like ancient heroes. More recently Atlantis is linked to the Minoan civilization of Cypern and surrounding islands, on the authority of some writings of ancient Egypt.

To Vikings and their forebears, the Golden Age was a time and place where gods loved to play, where tablets of shimmering gold lay in the grass. The Vikings were fond of gold and silver, we may gather, and of arable land too.

✑ Atlantis of Rudolf Steiner.

✑Atlantis of Edgar Cayce.

Technology Tidings

Look to Adam's paradise tasks from even before he knew what clothed meant. You have to know an awful lot to protect and defend your wife and garden if they are downright attractive, and do good gardening work so that it works well.

A technologically advanced society that is out of step with nature, results in crowding of people and abusing the countryside in industrial ways, and mars more and more unless sustainable. Environmental protection is a dire need. Sooner or later "everybody" has to wake up to it. Meanwhile it is often the weakest that will suffer the most. (First written around 1996, while there was some hope.)

Notes is not the finest side to music, nor is repeating works of notable others, although listening to such performances at times is OK.

Muted?

Jesus: The Queen of the South ... came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom, and now one greater than Solomon is here. [Cf. Matt 12:42, cf. Luke 11:31]

The planet has no ends (edges). The nearest you get to falling off the edge of that flat disc that ancient Hebrews and others thought up, is to be hurled into space - a feat celebrated by Americans after the moon landings . . .

The Old Testament also speaks of the corners and pillars of the earth, and Jesus - a child of his times - never stood up and corrected such wrong notions either – He called himself Truth as well.

◎ Besides, "Self-praise smells." (Norwegian proverbs)