I first came across Paul Krafel in the video of a conversation between Matthew and Arthur, where they mentioned his book Seeing Nature. I paused the video and immediately ordered the book. It felt like it could be a kind of nourishing experience (that is rare and precious) like I had last year reading Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order.
Then in one of the online Ceptr meetings, Art mentioned a video edit. When I went searching for it I came across this TED talk:
During my recent conversation with Jarod he mentioned the book again and also pointed me to this video edit that Eric made of a movie Paul Krafel produced. The video and audio quality is poort and it takes effort to overcome it, but it is well worth the effort of watching. It is to me a precious gift from Ceptr, following closely in the footsteps of Daniel’s Emergence talk.
The rest of this post is written with the Ceptr project in mind and heart. Two clear things emerged for me, in the context of Ceptr, from this initial exposure to the video. The first is about storytelling, the second about breathing.
Cyclic Storytelling
One of my interests in the Ceptr project is to contribute to storytelling … the membrane with which the project meets the world. For me personally, the challenge is how to share Ceptr with others. The spirit of Ceptr is rich and profound, while its current manifestation is technical and complicated. As my interest and potential for involvement with the project increase I find myself wanting to tell others about it and hitting a wall. It is difficult to communicate Ceptr. That aspect of storytelling is well-recognized in the Ceptr team.
As I was watching the video, I realized that this is a one-directional view of story-telling, from the inside out. I believe that for the story-telling to be complete and potent the other direction of flow also needs to be considered. What role does story-telling play when facing inwards? What role does storytelling play in resonating from the outside world into Ceptr? I feel at ease saying this because Ceptr is saturated in storytelling (which is one of the reasons I find it appealing).
My impression is that Ceptr itself was born this way. Ceptr is a child of MetaCurrency. Storytelling seems to have been a key element of MetaCurrency. It is through that story-telling that I discovered MetaCurrency and then Ceptr. I believe that storyelling generated feedback for the team … a storytelling from the outside in. That, in turn, led to the creation of Ceptr.
I believe that the story-telling effort can be just more than “explaining Ceptr to the world” but also about “shaping Ceptr into a story that the world can hear”. Any effort to build something within Ceptr resonates outwards through storytelling. Any effort to tell the story of Ceptr can resonate with feedback into what is being built. This feels to me like a potential spiral worth exploring
Breathing & Wholeness
As I listened to Paul Krafel’s description of the upward spiral that created the natural world, I thought about the sentience of nature and the sentience of human beings. Every water flow, evey fallen leaf, every stone, every beaver is responding to a web of forces acting on and around it and “making a choice” that reflects an integration of all those forces.
Then came to me a question I’ve lived with for some years: how can we (as human beings) learn to live, be and act in the world in this way? Our evolved consciousness can have both an upward and downward spiral effect on how we experience the world. Our evolved consciousness is more susceptible to both confusion and insight.
During my conversation with Jarod we talked about intuition. Robert Pirsig’s words created good context:
“Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation; that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly headed crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience … The value itself is an experience … It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible. Of all experience it is the least ambiguous, least mistakable there is … Later the person may generate some oaths to describe this low value, but the value will always come first, the oaths second.”
Robert Pirsig – Lila: An Inquiry into Morals
For the last few years I’ve had the privilege of being in what I like to call my “Yogurt Practice.” My first few years living in the village were demanding and required that much be done, sometimes with urgency, to make basic living possible. After that first stretch I found myself at a doorway to a new kind of experience. I was able to ask myself “what do you want to do now?” and only do things I wanted to do. Yes, wood needs to be chopped by winter, but there can be plenty of time to do it so I can only do it when I want to.
And so I settled into a practice.Constantly asking myself what I want and listening for answers (sitting on a hot stove). Learning to discern between those answers and my opinions about them, opinions that can appear in a blink of an eye, so close to the answers that it can be difficult to discern between the answer and my thoughts about them. Finally, acting on those answers (sometimes going against my better judgement of them).
The Yogurt example is one event that demonstrates the nature of this practice. I was filling a wheel-barrow with some wood-bark to move it from a pile into place to be used as mulch. The barrow was half-full when a question appeared “What do you want?”, followed by an answer “Yogurt.” Sure enough, thoughts quickly came: Yogurt? really? now? that simple? I can go to the fridge and get some yogurt … but maybe finish just this wheel-barrow and then … When the thoughts had passed I still had access to the original answer, left the wheel-barrow, took off my gloves and went to have Yogurt.
Living this way is fascinating experience. To constantly witness a gap between cutting-edge experiences and answers, and the echoes of thought processes that follow. I am exploring trusting and following that edge of experience – my intuitive voice. I believe it is a voice of integration of the kind of rocks and grass and fallen leaves. Though it sometimes seems to be in contradiction with my “reasonable thought processes”, I believe it integrates them too.
I have found that waiting to want requires patience and trust (that wanting will come, what laziness will not emerge, etc.); that when I act from wanting I act with more clarity, motivation and vitality; that I do get around to doing everything that needs to be done; that I do not get around to everything that I think I want to do; that the overall rhythm is finely tuned to me; that I get a lot more done then I think I can; that the things that in retrospect the things that don’t get done didn’t need to.
Christopher Alexander describes a “Fundamental Differentiating Process” that describes how he believes living things come into being. This is the closest description I’ve found to what rocks, grass, leaves and beavers “do”. To me it resonates strongly with the Paul Krafel’s observations:
- At any given moment in a process, we have a certain partially evolved state of a structure. This state is described by the wholeness: the system of centers, and their relative nesting and degrees of life.
- We pay attention as profoundly as possible to this WHOLENESS – its global, large-scale order, both actual and latent.
- We try to identify the sense in which this structure is weakest as a whole, weakest in its coherence as a whole, most deeply lacking in feeling.
- We look for the latent centers in the whole. These are not those centers which are robust and exist strongly already; rather they are centers which are dimly present in a weak form, but which seem to us to contribute to or cause the current absence of life in the whole.
- We then choose one of these latent centers to work on. It may be a large center, or middle-sized, or small.
- We use one or more of the fifteen structure-preserving transformations, singly or in combination, to differentiate and strengthen the structure in its wholeness.
- As a result of the differentiation which occurs, new centers are born. The extent of the fifteen properties which accompany creation of new centers will also take place.
- In particular we shall have increased the strength of parallel centers; and we shall also have increased the strength of smaller centers. As a whole, the structure will now, as a result of this differentiation, be stronger and have more coherence and definition as a living structure.
- We test to make sure that this is actually so, and that the presumed increase of life has actually taken place.
- We also test that what we have done is the simplest differentiation possible, to accomplish this goal in respect of the center that is under development.
- When complete, we go back to the beginning of this cycle, and apply the same process again.
The greatest challenge, I have expereinced, to applying such a process is my ability to perceive wholeness. I believe that wholeness is that which is brought to me in my “Yogurt practice”. It is something that I place more in the realm of “somewhere I arrive” instead of “somewhere I can go” … or “something that happens to me” instead of “something I do”. However I do believe that the odds of “me arriving” or “it happening” can be improved 🙂
I believe that much of what I was taught and practice in Yoga supported me in this direction. It is in that spirit that I offer the Ceptr residency program a practice of breathing. It it something I believe I can offer effectively remotely and is closest to my gifts and my heart. My wish is to:
- Create a shared opening where fundamental breathing technique can be introduced.
- To offer personal guidance to individuals who wish to experience a systemic yet magical evolution and change in their practice over the residency period.
- To periodically connect as a group and talk about the experience of breathing.