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Peter Wrycza ALIGNMENT

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WHEN PERFORMANCE MEETS ALIGNMENT

WHEN PERFORMANCEMEETS ALIGNMENT

A COMPASS FOR COACHING AND MENTORING

Jan Ardui and Peter Wrycza, PhD•BALI, APRIL 2005

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TO MY MOTHER, ANNE ARDUI-DE VOCHT AND MY SONS, KOBE AND JESSETO THE MEMORY OF GRACE JELF, FOR HER INSPIRATION AND GUIDANCE

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ..........................................................................9Foreword........................................................................................11Preface...........................................................................................13

PART I • PRELIMINARIES – THE WAY OF UNFOLDING ..............................17INTRODUCTION: When Performance Meets Alignment .......................... 19ONE: The Roots of Transformation................................................... 29TWO: Change, Learning, and Growth ............................................... 43

PART II • CHANGE .............................................................................57THREE: Facilitating Change............................................................... 59

PART III • LEARNING ......................................................................... 73FOUR: From Change to Learning ..................................................... 75FIVE: The Further Reaches of Learning.............................................97

PART IV • GROWTH ......................................................................... 113SIX: From Epistemology to Action: The Keys to Personal Mastery ..... 115SEVEN: Attentiveness...................................................................... 127EIGHT: Reflection ...........................................................................139NINE: Discernment.........................................................................159TEN: Commitment ........................................................................ 179

PART V • UNFOLDING......................................................................195ELEVEN: Unfolding in Action ........................................................... 197TWELVE: The Pattern which Connects .............................................. 215

Afterwords ................................................................................... 231Endnotes......................................................................................239Glossary.......................................................................................240Selected Reading...........................................................................243Authors ........................................................................................246

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to express our gratitude to France Camerlynck who made possible, and participated in, the series of discussions, held in a motel in Valenciennes (in 1995), which preceded and anticipated this work. We would also like to thank Piera Teatini, Gene Early, Steven Gilligan, Deborah Bacon, and Peter Winnington for their warmth, support, and helpful comments and feedback during the early stages of this work. We are grateful, too, for the substantial help and critiques of Mark Claerbout and Steven Warmoes, which inspired an important reworking of this material. We also extend our warm appreciation to Paul Gidvani for his careful reading. Thanks, too, to the staff of Nirarta for their understanding and patience, as we grappled with the strands of the web we were weaving. This book would never have taken the shape it has without the contribution of our teachers, students, and sponsors in many countries – including Belgium, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Morocco, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States – who both instilled in us, and drew out of us, the roots of the ideas we present here.

JAN AND PETER

There seem always to have been two ways of looking at the world. One is the everyday way in which objects and events, although they may be related causally and inﬂuence each other, are seen to be separate. And the other is a rather special way in which every thing is considered to be part of a much greater pattern.

LYALL WATSON,

Gifts of Unknown Things

FOREWORD

It is a pleasure to write this forward for When Performance Meets Align-ment by Jan Ardui and Peter Wrycza. I have known both men for almost 20 years and appreciate their commitment and contributions to the areas of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), coaching and consciousness. Throughout the years they have provided critical thought and leadership, seeking to embrace and preserve the integrity and quality of NLP as a ﬁ eld and at the same time enrich and evolve it.

To me, When Performance Meets Alignment is an expression of the emerging body of knowledge that is becoming known as ‘Third Generation NLP’. First generation NLP was the result of modelling the behaviours and techniques of psychotherapists. As a consequence, it tended to presuppose a therapeutic relationship in which the therapist knew what was best for his or her clients in order to solve their problems. NLP was considered something which one ‘did to other people’, primarily at a mental and behavioural level. Third generation NLP is more generative, systemic, and focused at higher levels of learning, interaction and development – including those relating to identity, vision, and mission.

Rather than present NLP and coaching as something done to others, Jan and Peter emphasize the importance of your own presence, self-reﬂ ection, and self-knowledge as central to helping others. Their approach echoes Gandhi’s comment that ‘you have to be the change you want to see in the world’. Their Life Dynamics model of Intention, Attention, Action, and Innocence is a good example of this.

Second generation NLP emerged out of the applications of NLP to the educational and organizational environments. While still focused on individuals, second generation NLP emphasized the relationship between oneself and expanded to include higher level issues, such as those related to beliefs, values and ‘meta-programmes’. Second generation NLP techniques integrated the use of new distinctions such as time lines, submodalities and perceptual positions. These were applied, however, still in a largely linear and mechanistic fashion. Third generation NLP emphasizes a more whole-system perspective. The techniques of third generation NLP are ‘ﬁeld based’, incorporating principles of self-organization and the

support of what is known as ‘fourth position’ – the identiﬁ cation with

the system.

In this regard, Jan and Peter’s distinction between an extended second position (projecting oneself into the shoes of several others) and a true fourth position as an identiﬁcation with a system of which one is part, is an important one. Rather than view change and growth as a linear and mechanical process, Jan and Peter see them as a process of unfolding. This view is reﬂ ected in their models of the Unfolding in Action Cycle and what they refer to as

‘the Way of Unfolding’. These reﬂect the assumption of third generation

NLP that the wisdom needed for change is already within the system and

can be discovered and released by creating the appropriate context.

The steps to unfolding are captured in Jan and Peter’s four Keys to Personal Mastery – reﬂection, attentiveness, discernment, and commitment. Throughout the book, the authors effectively ‘denominalize’ these terms and bring them to life through a rich combination of personal experiences, quotations, stories, and examples.

I am grateful to Jan and Peter for bringing their perspective into the growing body of knowledge relating to coaching and mentoring. Beyond being effective coaches, mentors, and teachers themselves, Jan and Peter are awakeners, casting a bright light on the important link between introspection and action.

ROBERT DILTS

Santa Cruz, California

February 2005

FOREWORD

PREFACE

This book is the fruit of a long friendship and collaboration. It arose from our experiences in the late 1980s and 1990s teaching, coaching, and consulting with Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Although this model proved highly effective in our work with individuals, it was less well suited to larger systems. We began to seek a coherent framework to accommodate our work with both individuals and organizations.

From the outset, we sensed that there is a connecting pattern in the way people, organizations, and nature evolve. Greater sensitivity to this pattern, we believe, can help orient our personal life, enhance our relationships, and ease our participation in the larger systems of which we are part.

Such sensitivity is vital to the helping relationship. It is at the heart of the approach to development facilitation that we share with you in these pages. Increasing alignment with life’s unfolding pattern, we ﬁ nd, is a key to naturally enhanced performance that is respectful of self, others, and the wider context of which we are part.

What emerged in our collaboration often surprised us. The corpus of insights presented here appeared to have a life of its own. The process of conceiving and writing it seemed to enliven something that wanted to demonstrate and conﬁrm itself to us, too. We found that deeper understanding indeed arises from a closer connection with what Bateson called ‘the pattern which connects’. And that pattern is sometimes easier to discern in what emerges in the space between two people than in the individuals themselves. That mysterious process is something for which we continue to feel awe and gratitude.

In writing this book, we drew inspiration not only from recent thinking in the West, but also from ancient ideas that have underpinned the vibrant and resilient culture of Bali, where much of this work was conceived and written.

We are conscious of attempting to develop something fresh, while participating in a seismic shift in human thinking. It is difﬁcult to deﬁ ne this

new thinking in a few words, although it manifests as the implicit project of twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst century research in almost every discipline. We can, however, point to a number of characteristics of this emerging paradigm.

It is cross-disciplinary, involving similar trends that have appeared in biology, physics, philosophy, literature, literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, art, music, psychotherapy, and the new ﬁelds of cybernetics, systems, and chaos theory. Developments in all these disciplines place less emphasis on anatomical identiﬁ cation of parts and more on structure, pattern, and connectedness. Content is less important than the principles, structures, and processes underlying and implicit in the surface of things.

As such, the new way of thinking is holistic rather than atomistic. It is less concerned with individual items and linear causality than with sets of relationships among the elements of a system as a whole. These relationships are frequently described in terms of recursivity and circularity of forward and backward feedback.

The new disciplines also posit a high degree of interconnection between us and the world. Mind and nature, as Bateson intimated, form a ‘necessary unity’. Mind is present not only in us but also in nature, implicit in our shared participation in ‘the pattern which connects’. The patterns in nature are part of the patterns in us, both because we are part of nature, and because we are the perceivers and organizers of those patterns. We are both an inseparable part of the world in which we ﬁ nd ourselves and observers and coders of that world.

This makes the new thinking highly subjectivistic and self-reﬂ exive, concerned not only with thinking, but also with thinking about our thinking. We recognize as never before that it is we who give meaning and coherence to experience. Everything we know, we acknowledge, is intimately dependent on our own physiological and psychological processes. Knowledge is inseparable from our ways of perceiving and deﬁ ning it, particularly through language and culture. ‘Objective’ reality becomes slippery. We ﬁnd that we can no longer pretend to be impartial observers of nature and society. We are intimately implicated in our observations, which reveal as much about the observer as they do about what is observed.

PREFACE

This subjectivist emphasis in recent thinking also makes it highly relativistic. Since meaning derives from its context and the frames one places around it, what one thinks is always provisional. Frequent travel and rapid communication mean that different cultures, languages, religions and philosophies rub shoulders with each other in ways that were never before possible. This leads us not only to seek the patterns and principles that inﬂuence thinking within a particular culture, but also to consider the patterns present in the whole process of enculturation whatever form a culture takes.

Meaning becomes ‘intertextual’, deriving from the interaction of the elements of the whole system of meaning. With global communication, football chants may transpose themselves from the terraces of Old Trafford in Manchester to the funeral rites of eastern Bali. As they do so, they shift context and meaning. Nonetheless, they still insert themselves into self-regulating systems in which the parts cohere with the whole in superﬁ cially different but structurally similar ways.

These cross-disciplinary trends are highly pertinent to the process of facilitating development. In the helping relationship, whether with individuals or with groups and organizations, we are inevitably concerned with how people give meaning to experience. In this process, we are never innocent bystanders, but intimate participants in a process of unfolding that includes both ourselves and others, within a larger context of social and planetary evolution. Sensitivity to the connecting pattern is a vital element, we believe, in fostering the weaving and unweaving of life’s patterns. That is the red thread running through this work.

Bali, March 2005

PREFACE

PART I

PRELIMINARIES:THE WAY OF UNFOLDING

INTRODUCTION

WHEN PERFORMANCE MEETS ALIGNMENT

At the still point of the turning world. Neither ﬂesh nor ﬂ eshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it ﬁ xity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

T.S.ELIOT, Four Quartets

A BETTER LIFE

Everybody wants a better life. It takes a strange person to say: ‘I long to create a miserable future for myself. I hope my children’s lives are blighted. I would like to eat rotting scraps, fall out with my friends, and live where the quality of life is going down the tubes.’

We may deﬁne a better life in different ways, but it is part of our humanity to prefer to grow and develop, fulﬁl promise, and to enjoy and become more.

Preferring pleasure to pain is a given. When things have been rough, we may give more attention to lightening the burden of pressing problems than to realizing hopes, dreams, and aspirations. But whether we steer by the wake behind us or are guided by the stars, our preferred direction is progressive.

Of course, not everything we do has positive consequences. Sometimes it looks as if people make choices that will take them further from fulﬁ lment rather than bring them closer to it. But all that we do is ultimately in the service of some positive intention, however unfortunate the choice of means to satisfy it.

So strong is this thirst for a better life that, not only do we each attempt to satisfy it personally, but many people make their living by helping others improve their lot. Great numbers of social workers, therapists, and

counsellors help people overcome obstacles in their lives. And an army of coaches and consultants are busy helping individuals and organizations deﬁne and achieve goals. Teachers, lecturers, and trainers work hard to help people develop new competencies. A large part of the work of the medical profession, managers, administrators, civic and political leaders consists in helping people overcome difﬁculties and realize new possibilities. Every doctor and nurse is part psychologist, every teacher, part counsellor, every business leader, a coach, every priest or religious worker, part counsellor, and every politician, something of a consultant. Even in our personal relationships, we often ﬁnd ourselves an informal midwife to some difﬁcult choice or transition. The same holds for families, where parents and grandparents facilitate the growth and development of their children and grandchildren, often long after the child has become an independent adult.

Yet the process of development and how to support it is of such mystery and complexity that it takes committed professionals years of practice to feel they have a model of sufﬁcient richness, depth, and subtlety to accompany others at difﬁcult times in their lives with ease and conﬁ

dence.

Approaches to the process of development vary so much that it is difﬁcult to reconcile them. At one extreme, for instance, we have approaches to ‘brief therapy’ aiming for rapid solution to speciﬁc challenges. At the other, we have the notion of years of analysis to understand and realign the deeper structures and ﬁ ssures of the psyche.

Our aim in these pages is to provide a practical framework for supporting the process of development – both for those concerned with their own development and for those who want to facilitate the development of the individuals and organisations they work with. We offer an approach to development that is simple, yet comprehensive, and sensitive to the different layers of development – whether negotiating change or supporting the more subtle processes of growth.

INTRODUCTION

WHEN PERFORMANCE MEETS ALIGNMENT – THE ART OF LIVING

While our backgrounds in training, coaching, consulting, and mentoring predispose us to emphasize the professional side of personal development, there is a real sense in which this book is ultimately a handbook

in the art of living.

Our aim is to help those who would like to enhance their effectiveness – and those who help them – be more successful in their chosen domain in a way that is respectful both of personal needs and the demands of the context. We would like this book to help people become more dynamic and capable, but with wisdom.

Many inspirational books and seminars aimed at those hoping for success encourage imbalance, stimulating people to squeeze limited resources, without respecting the wider ecology. In these pages, we envis

age something more wholesome – a way of being that supports successful action, while in accord with the pattern unfolding in the wider world.

We would like people to enjoy peak performance in a context of heightened well-being. This is the key to the art of living.

The art of living presupposes an intimate synergy between ‘performance’ and ‘alignment’. Performance points to the realm of action. Whoever we are, we realize ourselves in large part in and through what we do. But the quality and effectiveness of our actions depend on our relationship not only with ourselves, but also with our context.

If we only emphasize performance, we are likely to be imbalanced and out of synchrony both with ourselves and with our context. If we only emphasize inner alignment, we are likely to be disengaged and ineffectual.

When performance meets alignment, what we do nourishes and fulﬁ ls who we are, while our being infuses what we do, ensuring grace and effectiveness in execution.

There is a great difference between our performance meeting our alignment and the reverse. When alignment meets performance, we have the ability of an accomplished actor to assume a role with conviction. In real life, when alignment is made to serve performance, substance is lost. Alignment in that sense precedes performance.

If there is a dearth of great leadership in the world today, it is because performance is king. Marketeers and presentation specialists are more adept at bringing alignment to performance than the reverse. Media savvy politicians have become the rule rather than the exception in many countries. As a result, patina prevails and substance is missing, to the detriment of principled leadership almost everywhere.

We trust that the approach to development facilitation offered in these pages will not only enrich the work of those who help others grow, but in the process support the emergence of leaders of substance. This book is not about how to change people, but how to enhance performance through greater alignment. The approach to development we share provides a framework for those who want to lead their own lives in a respectful and responsible way. This is a prerequisite for leading others with respect and responsibility.

Since the essential unity of performance and alignment we emphasize here is the key to the development of principled leadership, it is central to the work of coaches, mentors, and all those who seek to stimulate performance in others, as well as for those who simply want to enhance their own mastery of the art of living.

A DEEPER PATTERN

From time to time, strange things happen. An odd coincidence, an unexpected piece of good fortune, or some fortuitous timing may surprise us. Perhaps, we enter a restaurant and there is the very person we wanted to meet or were hoping to avoid. Or the telephone rings just as we are thinking of an old friend, who calls out of the blue. At such moments, we may wonder: is this just an interesting coincidence or does it point to some deeper mystery, some hidden pattern to events?

We may join Baudelaire in a world of mysterious correspondences, as evoked in the following lines:

La nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles.

L’homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles

Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

Nature is a temple whose living pillarsSometimes let forth unclear words.

Man passes there through a forest of symbols

That watch him with a familiar gaze.

Or we may wall ourselves in a fortress of rationalism, in which everything can be explained logically.

Both perspectives can be attractive. And both can lead us astray. One leads to the magical thinking of a child or simple folk, who have not yet understood basic principles of causality. The other kills the beauty and poetry of life, reducing our sense of the magical and sacred to a tedious rationalism in which moments of wonder become ‘mere coincidences’ or ‘just imagination’.

In the West, it is natural for us to take the perspective of the rational mind. We readily think of ourselves as separate selves, distinct from one another and from nature, able to think objectively about the world around us. Such thinking is important. The pathway from the infant’s world, mixed up with projections and fantasies about signiﬁcant others, to the rational adult, who can think in a scientiﬁ c way, is hard won and not to be lightly thrown away.

But, at the same time, we are not really separate from each other, nor from the wider world. We are inevitably part of a larger pattern. Poetry and fantasy, space for dreams and imagination, are vitally important. Our sense of beauty and wonder are not only essential ingredients to a feeling of fullness, richness, and deep enjoyment, they are portals to a special kind of sensitivity in which we connect to that larger pattern. They are part of how we come into alignment with the subtle currents of life as a whole. They are ways in which we become aware of how things are developing, so that we can intuit the appropriate response to them, and thus live with wisdom and discernment, choosing the best pathway of action and minimizing the mistakes that can so easily hurt both ourselves and others.

There is, then, we propose, an important middle way between rationalism and magical thinking – one that respects the majesty and mystery of life, without regressing to superstition and vapid pseudo-spirituality. That way involves becoming aware of what we call ‘the Way of Unfolding’, the pattern of transformation within, without, and among us.

The way things happen is important. There is a larger pattern to life. We are inevitably part of that pattern, in which everything is interconnected and everything is evolving and developing in its own way, within the whole. The whole, too, is developing and evolving in and through its parts.

Our own lives have a pattern, a coherence, and a timing, which makes each of us a story that is being told, a process with its own coherence and meaning, unfolding by itself to itself, in ways that we do not always appreciate fully as things happen. Our lives have a rhythm, shape, and pattern, which makes our own evolution and development as natural as the growth of a child to adulthood or the transformation of a seed into a mature plant. That shape or pattern often only becomes clear with hindsight.

From this perspective, whatever happens in our lives, in the normal course of events, is just as it should be. We and the world are perfect as we are, for we are just part of the general pattern of unfolding.

This would normally invite us to be very accepting of things being the way they are right now. And yet, an important part of things being perfect just as they are is our deep longing for a ‘better life’. We inevitably hope for greater happiness and success for those close to us. We wish for our world to become a ‘better place’, in which there is more love, and less struggle and cruelty.

Our longing for things to be other than as they are is also part of how things are as they are in this moment. It is part of the very process of unfolding that we observe in the growth of living systems, in the patterns of evolution in the natural world, and in the story of our own lives.

In our natural quest to improve our lives, to better the conditions of our family or our society, there is both an implicit wisdom and a lot of stupidity. On the one hand, we are simply manifesting and expressing life’s intrinsic tendency to evolve and develop, for order to arise and unfold on the edge of chaos. On the other hand, we can ﬁ nd ourselves swimming against the tide. Often, we do not respect either our own or nature’s rhythms and we discover that the things we want to change stay just as they are, while the things we want to remain constant, mysteriously alter.

The challenge we face is how to align ourselves with the deeper pattern of our lives, so that as much as possible we are at one with the story that is unfolding within and through us. Then, we can enjoy an underlying sense of peace, while participating fully in whatever is happening in our lives.

Life invites and impels us to learn. And the most simple, yet challenging, thing to learn is how to strike a balance between being receptive to the unfolding pattern of events in and around us, while proactively participating with energy and commitment in the shaping of that pattern. The most comfortable relationship we can enjoy with the inevitable and irresistible process of unfolding lies in a ﬁne balance between receiving and initiating. The Way of Unfolding means not getting in the way of unfolding, nor being out of the way, but being at one with it, now receiving, now initiating, as ﬁ ts, at the right time.

In Bali, where much of this book was written, this is called ‘dharma’. Dharma is the pivotal point between two opposite and complementary tendencies, the one strong and forceful, ‘Vishesh’; the other gentle and receptive, ‘Suksma’. To live in accord with Dharma is to ﬁnd that subtle point of balance, where we are receptive, but not passive, active but not oblivious of the larger picture. This is Eliot’s still point in the turning world, the centre of life’s dance.

Dance provides a helpful analogy here. Some dancers say that, in a longer piece, they experience that the whole choreography unfolds in a natural and irresistible way. At each point, the body knows how to respond, because what happens is part of an inevitable ﬂow. When the dancer is at one with this natural ﬂ ow, the whole process is natural and effortless.

This is important, also, for a life well lived. The dance of life has a subtle and intrinsic choreography. All our learning and experience draws us towards a greater sensitivity to that choreography, so that we dance our own dance, while remaining an integral part of the larger ballet.

The more insensitive we are to the deeper patterns in the choreography of life, the more we experience our lives as struggle. We stumble in the dance of life.

As development facilitators, this affects us in two ways. First, if we are out of kilter with the unfolding patterns of life, it is far harder for us to ﬂow elegantly with the client’s unfolding. We will not be in alignment with the tempo of his or her development and will miss opportunities to support what is happening or expect more than what is possible at a particular moment. Second, we will be a poor example to the client of the kind of integration and alignment he or she may need to develop.

This book, then, invites a deeper alignment with the choreography of one’s life and hence with the subtle choreography of life as a whole, so that the development facilitator can be in alignment with the client’s unfolding, while also serving as a model of that alignment in the helping relationship.

Such sensitivity to the implicit choreography of life ultimately lies in a certain kind of awareness, in which we are both engaged as doers and actors, yet in a deeper sense a simple all-embracing witness to the patterns unfolding within and without us.

Awareness is subtle and elusive. It generally takes time to awaken fully to that simple, all-accepting, all-containing witnessing awareness. But its enlivening can be helped by the development of a number of, subtle and universal skills that can stand us in good stead, whoever we are, wherever we are, and whatever we do. The ﬁrst key is through a greater sensitivity to pattern and how we pattern. This is in part the subject of Chapter One, in which we discuss the deep structure of pattern in general and introduce the notion of ‘generative patterns’, self-unfolding patterns present at every level of the natural world.

In Chapter Two, we go more deeply into the way unfolding manifests in our lives, through the interplay of the forces of change, our ability to learn, and the deeper, long-term process of growth. In the following chapter, we deﬁne the nature of change and consider how we can initiate and support it. Chapter Four outlines the key processes that are necessary to manage change fully and develop a higher kind of learning – multi-levelled thinking, multiple perspectives, questioning, and expanding boundaries. In Chapter Five, we consider the full development of these abilities as part of mature and deep learning. We return to the theme of pattern, considering how we can deepen our learning through perception and management of pattern.

In Chapter Six, we touch the limits of learning. We point to the ambiguous nature of skills, as both expanding our capabilities, while also enmeshing us in habit. We suggest that what we call the ‘Keys to Personal Mastery’ can stimulate growth, while deepening our alignment and enhancing performance. These keys to development presuppose a connection between inner awareness and the more active expressions of our thinking and feeling. The following four chapters each explore one of these keys, dealing respectively with attentiveness, reﬂection, discernment, and commitment. In Chapter Eleven, we consider how the Keys to Personal Mastery working together enable us to engage fully and actively in life’s unfolding as it happens, so that we both receive and create the pattern of our lives, not only moment by moment, but also in the slower, less obvious process of growth and development. Lastly, in Chapter Twelve, we return to the notion of the larger connecting pattern and the overall process of unfolding.

This book itself has been intended to reﬂect a process of unfolding, in the ﬂow of chapters, which can thus beneﬁt from being read sequentially. However, it is possible for the reader to follow his or her own pattern of reading and skip ahead in places, coming back to other parts later. Readers who like to have a sense of where the whole is leading might dip into the last two chapters, before returning to a more sequential reading.

INTRODUCTION

ONE

THE ROOTS OF TRANSFORMATION

Out of the one two, out of the two, three, out of the three four, and out of the four the ten thousand things.

LAO TSE

INTRODUCTION

In the nineteenth century, a young Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins

– later to be acknowledged as one of the most original and powerful poetic voices in the English language – gave much thought to the nature of beauty and its relationship to the natural world and to the Divine. Hopkins observed that beauty was intimately related to pattern, and pattern arises from the interplay of recurring elements with elements of difference. For instance, contemplating a chestnut tree, he noted that every leaf is part of a set of relationships of sameness and difference. Each leaf consists of ﬁve smaller leaves, each of which is largely symmetrical but not quite. The parts of the leaf are similar and related in shape and proportion, but each different from the other. Each leaf as a whole looks like every other, but has its own uniqueness. On a larger scale, each branch repeats this pattern of a complex relationship between sameness and difference, the leaves of each branch arranged similarly and differently to those of every other branch. As a result, each branch is both like and unlike the other branches. On a larger scale, each tree is recognizable as a chestnut tree, similar to other chestnuts, but with its own unique variation.

For Hopkins, this dynamic tension between sameness and difference lies at the core of our experience of beauty both in nature and in our own aesthetic creations, such as art, music, and poetry.

Hopkins’ intuitions are central to what we are seeking to share in this book. Our starting assumption is that we and the world around us participate in a vast network of patterns. Life emerges in a complex relationship of patterns of sameness and difference. Things repeat and recur but in a

way that is rarely boring, with sometimes subtle and sometimes striking differences. Similarity and difference summon each other.

Pattern is fundamental to our world. But in a curious way pattern both is and is not. Like chestnut leaves, each of us is similar to every other being, and at the same time unique. One thing we share is a sensitivity to pattern. Pattern ﬁlls our sights, and sounds, and sensing. It recurs in our habits of thinking and doing. Pattern is both present in the world as part of its very nature, yet inextricable from our own perceiving and thinking. We both perceive patterns that exist ‘out there’, and we create them from the unique ways we punctuate experience.

For instance, if we sit by a mountain river on a large rock, the river’s pools might call us to deep thoughts about our lives, while its motion and sound invite a more ﬂowing way of thinking. Who is to distinguish where the patterns of the river and the patterns of our response to it begin and end? What is for sure is that we easily ﬁ nd the river stimulating something reﬂexive inside ourselves, while its pattern of ﬂow holds even when we are not there.

CHANGE, STABILITY, AND SELF-TRANSCENDENCE

So far we have described pattern as a constellation of sameness and difference that repeats in space or time. However, there is an order of difference between the kind of pattern offered by a chequered tablecloth and the patterns displayed by a rose.

The patterns of nature are rarely static. They reﬂect a creative tension between inﬂuences towards continuing sameness and tendencies towards alteration and differentiation. We can thus describe the patterns of nature, not only in terms of sameness and differences, but in terms of a dynamic relationship between stability and change. We see these twin tendencies present throughout every level of nature. Atoms, molecules, cells, creatures, people, and organizations all tend to maintain their wholeness, while responding and adapting to their context

As coaches and consultants, we ﬁnd ourselves particularly sensitive to these twin tendencies towards stability and change. People and organizations need stability to maintain their coherence. They also ﬁ nd themselves

PART I • ONE • THE ROOTS OF TRANSFORMATION

drawn and compelled to adjust and change – sometimes stimulated from within, sometimes from without. Managing the relationship between the tendency to change and the tendency to stay the same becomes crucial for the well being of individuals, couples, groups, and organizations. Too much change and the whole system may come apart; too little and it may stagnate or become ill-adapted to its environment.

Jan’s father died when he was eleven years old. Jan noticed that his father’s death meant there was an abrupt change in the family system. Yet in many respects things continued much as they were. His father remained very present in the family. In a strange way, it seemed to him that his father had to die physically in order for the family system to maintain its wholeness. Sometimes change is necessary for stability, while the opposite also holds true.

The relationship between stability and change, however pervasive, only partially explains the evolution of living systems. In the complex patterns of life, we observe an inherent self-evolving teleology in the interplay between the tendencies towards stability and change. The interaction of patterns of stability and patterns of adaptability, what Ken Wilber calls ‘agency’ and ‘communion’ (self-perpetuation and relationship), are not completely random or arbitrary. There is a kind of gravity towards new orders of patterning in which fresh possibilities can emerge. For this reason, writers such as Whitehead have emphasized the inherent creativity of our universe, while Jantsch has described natural systems as ‘self-transcending’. Self-transcendence reﬂects some intrinsic intelligence that appears to make the interplay

of stability and change lean towards creative transformation.

This tendency towards self-transcendence appears throughout nature. The complex patterns of nature have an inherent tendency both to fulﬁ l and to go beyond themselves. The chestnut tree, for instance, lives and grows. Given a chestnut, one can predict what the fully-grown tree might look like, but one cannot know exactly what the ﬁnal pattern of leaves and branches will be. The tree displays a dynamic relationship between tendencies to change and tendencies towards stability. It develops, evolves, and adapts to its environment, while it remains intrinsically itself in its chestnut-treeness. The relationship between stability and change is always potentially self-transcending. Self-transcendence guides the process

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that leads the seed to transcend itself in yielding to the growing shoot, the growing shoot to release itself to roots and branches, and eventually to bear fruit. Self-transcendence leads the tree to mature, age, and die, surrendering its elements back to the world they came from.

Self-transcendence plays an important part in our lives on many levels. To give one example, one of the authors (Jan) was once asked to do some therapy with a young man of 25, who had spent most of the previous ﬁve years in a mental hospital. After exploring some of the causes of his psychotic breakdown, Jan felt something was keeping him a psychiatric patient. So Jan decided to include his parents in the process. These he found somewhat helpless, hopeless, and purposeless. It turned out that their son’s psychotic breakdown had occurred two months after they both retired. Before their retirement they were concerned about having no work and no signiﬁcant role in the world. In discussing this loss of meaning, the son realized with surprise that his illness had given them a new purpose. His psychotic breakdown had kept them constantly busy taking care of his treatment and needs. The parents also realized that they had accepted the new role provided by their son.

From then on the couple began to search for what connected them to each other and gave them purpose – both as individuals and as a couple. Previously, they had been heavily oriented towards ﬁnding their purpose through what they did. This new insight helped them go beyond the old pattern and enjoy life for its own sake. At ﬁrst, their son responded aggressively, trying to bring them back to their old responsibilities. The shift the parents had made required him also to transcend his old pattern.

Self-transcendence often manifests in some surprising shift when there is an interruption in the existing relationship between stability and change. In the helping relationship, moments of pause, emptiness, or silence (when habitual patterns are interrupted) provide a welcome gap in which the new can emerge.

Often we sense the quality of self-transcendence when we tune in to the growing edge of living systems, whether they be trees, people, or organizations and groups. This is not an intellectual process, but one of sensing a kind of energy within the system we are involved with.

Self-transcendence is not only manifest at the level of the individual member of a species or system, it also appears over vast time frames and

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among whole groups and classes of a system. A tree is an autonomous, or what Francisco Varela calls ‘auto-poietic’, organism. At the same time, it is part of a community of trees that is in a constant process of adaptation to changes in its context. Its offspring offer possibilities that may transcend its own ability to cope with its shifting environment. If the tree lived forever, it would radically curtail the capacity of its species to transcend itself.

Curiously, self-transcendence is reﬂected both in the expansion of identity and in its sublimation. Throughout nature, we ﬁnd at every level that simple elements become subsumed into more complex patterns, in which new possibilities emerge. Sub-atomic particles form atoms. These, in turn, combine to form molecules in which they transcend their identity, while continuing to exist as part of a new pattern. The new pattern has properties we could not predict from what we know of the separate elements. Similarly, molecules combine to form living cells, in which their identity is both subsumed and transcended.

Cells, too, join to form more complex organs and organisms. Increasing biological complexity permits greater sensory and mental sophistication, until we ﬁ nd the self-reﬂ exive patterns of mental organization characteristic of our species. As individuals, we also enter relationships that take us beyond ourselves. What we might lose in singularity is compensated for by gains at the collective level. This is true already at the level of the couple, which sacriﬁces some individual freedom to enjoy more through partnership.

In the modern world, we transcend individual limitations for mutual economic beneﬁt with networks of organizations involving collaboration among hundreds of thousands of people – as in our global telecommunication system, which links large companies and organizations in many different countries. This huge co-operative endeavour in turn supports collective creativity in almost every ﬁeld by allowing people everywhere to communicate rapidly with each through telephony and email wherever they are.

The self-transcending interplay between stability and change that we observe everywhere in nature makes of this universe a vast arena in which patterns emerge and develop. From atoms to academies, from leptons to learning organizations, self-transcendence, stability, and change are

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manifest through creation from top to bottom and from end to end. The unfolding of individuals, social structures, and natural systems can all be described in terms of the same essential patterns.

These patterns, Koestler (and Wilber after him) called ‘holons’ (thingsprocesses with their own integrity and coherence deﬁnable by an observer). Holons are in relationship with other wholes, of which they may become part. These patterns are generative. Learning and creativity appear implicit in them. Their inherent self-transcendence gives a momentum and direction to a process in which, in time, the self-reﬂexive mystery of life almost inevitably must appear, develop, and surpass itself.

We call such self-evolving patterns ‘generative patterns’, because of their inherent creativity. In the relationship between the impulse towards stability and that towards change, the possibility of something new and unexpected emerging is always present. Generative patterns, like Wilber’s holons, can be viewed as both wholes and parts. They have their own autonomy and coherency. Yet they are embedded into larger systems, in which their own identity may be transcended as they participate in higher levels of organization.

In the remarkable story that leads from electrons and quarks to the family of nations, Nature appears ﬁnely balanced between nothing and too much. The self-organizing patterns of nature are not random, yet nor do they appear predetermined. In the self-transcending interplay between stability and change manifest at every level of creation, the Universe appears an enormous, perhaps the ultimate, generative pattern.

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GENERATIVE PATTERNING

Through our perception of pattern, and the patterns in how we do this, we manage the tendencies towards stability and change, sameness and difference, at work in our lives. Unfortunately, at times we become stuck or restricted by the limitations in our habitual ways of handling pattern. Blindness to our patterns feeds them. Becoming aware of our patterns is liberating. If we gain insight into the nature of our patterning, we can use our patterning abilities to transcend these limitations. Then we can talk of ‘Generative Patterning’. Generative Patterning means having a self-transcending relationship with the patterns of our lives. Generative Patterning means becoming increasingly aware of the typical ways in which we are handling our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, and nudging those patterns of thought in a more helpful direction.

In the helping relationship, we are inevitably assisting the client in transcending limiting patterns of thinking and behaviour. But when the client discovers how to have this kind of relationship with his or her own patterns, the way is open for his or her patterning to become generative.

Generative Patterning is like enjoying being at home and at the same time creating that home, receiving a gift while also making it, or writing a book while also being a new reader of it. Such paradoxical experiences are part of everyday life. Having a child is at the same time a creation from the unique togetherness of sameness and differences in the couple and a gift of life itself that goes far beyond the creative capacities that we as humans appear to hold.

Many artists describe their creative process as a strange mix of creating and receiving. Sometimes the painter is the one who is in charge of what is appearing on the canvas. At other times it is as if canvas and brushes tell the painter what to do and he or she is on the receiving side of the creative process.

In writing, too, there is a strange mix of reaching after and letting be. Such a mix of receptivity and proactivity is at the heart of a meaningful and generative relationship with the complex patterns of life. Generative Patterning presupposes that we both actively explore pattern as we encounter it in the hurly-burly of daily life, and at the same time allow the tissue of life to unfold and reveal its wonders and mysteries to us. This

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mix of receptivity and reaching after means that we cannot only rush

about chasing our often poorly chosen ends in life. We also need time to

be open to receive guidance and gifts from quietness and reﬂ ection.

Generative Patterning thus means cultivating a greater sensitivity not only to our own patterns but to the patterns of nature, too. In tuning with our hearts and minds into the patterns woven into the web of life, we gain insight into the great mystery of the world in which we ﬁ nd ourselves. Since our own hearts and minds are part of that web, in tuning into the patterns of life, we are also tuning into our own hearts and minds, and to the heart and mind of all that is.

Generative Patterning is especially important today. The increasing sophistication of our world, with its accelerating impetus towards specialization, calls for an approach to life that while respecting complexity also grounds us in a deep sense of relationship with that which uniﬁ es and connects complexity.

Such sensitivity, we believe, makes an important qualitative difference to our work as development facilitators. When we are attuned to the deep connecting patterns in ourselves, other people, and the world around us, we are better able to accompany the client in a process of discovering and realigning the deep connecting patterns within him- or herself.

THE WAY OF UNFOLDING COMPASS

In developing the notions of Generative Patterning and the Way of Unfolding, we found similar concepts present in traditional Balinese philosophy. Such notions have helped keep the culture of Bali remarkably resilient in the face of rapid change in recent years. Generally, the Balinese display a remarkable ability to assimilate change while conserving the essence of their culture.

While the Balinese may use a more traditional language than ‘stability’, ‘change’, and ‘self transcendence’, the notions they do have are close to

these. These qualities are often elaborated in the form of a mandala or

lotus with eight petals. Typically, the quality of stability is placed at the

top and change at the bottom, with self-transcendence in the middle. This

suggests that stability, paradoxically, is in change, and change in stability.

The mandala of life rests in change, while stability has the propensity to

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change. These opposites are both expressions of self-transcendence in the centre. It is through their dynamic interaction that self-transcendence can be expressed in the evolutionary unfolding of this world.

If we consider the nature of that transformational process, we can see that the dance between stability and change unfolds as it does, because it is intrinsically intelligent and energetic. Just as stability and change are expressions of self-transcendence, so energy and intelligence are qualities of the creative centre and source of life. In our personal lives, we may perceive the manifesting energy as strength, and intelligence as purity (of mind).

Adding these qualities to the mandala or compass, as we call it, provides a more elaborate description of generative patterns and the deep structure of transformation.

We call these qualities, as they manifest in our lives, the Fundamentals of Alignment. When we are in alignment, head, heart, and viscera are in accord. We feel strength behind us, and purity before us revealing a clear

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view of the way ahead. We ourselves are at the centre, in the simplicity of our presence and being.

For full alignment, these qualities need to be present and in balance at the

same time – stability with change, purity and strength all together.

In our work as development facilitators, we are sensitive to the client’s relationship with stability and change, noticing his or her response to the ‘attractors’ inviting alteration and those inviting continuity and constancy. We are conscious of the mix of purity of intelligence and strength with which the client faces present and future.

We are sensitive to the balance in the body, which reﬂects the way in which the relationship between stability and change, purity and strength is being embodied. We are conscious of the relationship between the source of passion and vitality in the belly and the stabilizing inﬂ uence of the intellect in the head. We consider how these might be reconciled in the mid-point in the seat of self-transcendence within the heart. In other language, we are attuned to how the client has his or her feet on the ground and his or her head in the sky – the balance between dreams and reality, vision and action. We are sensitive to both the vertical and horizontal axes, noticing the way in which the client feels strength supporting from behind and purity and intelligence showing the way forward.

The interaction among the qualities we have placed along the vertical and horizontal axes of the Fundamentals of Alignment suggests four further qualities emerging from their relationship. Thus, the relationship between stability and energy suggests a mix of drive and ﬁxity. Drive and ﬁ xity are preconditions for a direction. Similarly, the relationship between stability and intelligence suggests connection with our own consciousness or what we term the quality of ‘inwardness’.

The relationship between energy and change suggests bubbling manifestation or, in our lives, the capacity for expression. The relationship between change and intelligence suggests a kind of awareness oriented to what is happening in the ﬁ eld of change. We call this quality, ‘connection’.

Direction and connection are in dynamic and systemic relationship. Without a direction, there is no movement in the ﬁeld. Without connection, direction is either aimless or ignorant of its context. To fulﬁ l our purpose or to achieve a goal requires not only a direction, but the ability

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to situate that direction in its context, to know what it is connected to, and an awareness of what will inﬂuence progress towards it, whether positively or negatively.

Similarly, inwardness and expression are in dynamic relationship. Without inwardness to anchor us in the source of consciousness, our expression is likely to be wild and chaotic. Without expression to draw out our inwardness, we are likely to be reclusive hermits, unengaged in the world.

Direction, connection, inwardness, and expression presuppose a quality of balance and poise at the centre. This quality we can call ‘awareness’. Together, direction, connection, inwardness, expression, and awareness, we call the Fundamentals of Performance. These are the keys to accomplishment in the world: knowing where we are heading, being aware of the context, connected to self and source, yet engaged in active expression. When direction, connection, inwardness and expression are in balance and working together in our awareness, we have the elements of effective performance. A direction springing from inner inspiration and linked to dynamic expression, with a lot of sensitivity and awareness of context, is likely to lead to effective and worthwhile results.

At a very basic level, in the helping relationship, we are sensitive to the client’s ability to act effectively in the world. That means being able to conceive and hold a direction while recognizing its appropriateness for the context, being grounded in the self, yet able to express potential and realize plans and dreams in the world.

Alignment is essential for effortless and effective expression and action. In that sense, we can say that alignment is a prerequisite for performance, and the Fundamentals of Alignment take precedence over the Fundamentals of Performance.

However, in practice, it is essential to consider performance and alignment in relation to each other. While excessive focus on accomplishment can throw us out of alignment, excessive attention to alignment divorced from performance can also be limiting. It is relatively easy to be in harmony with ourselves and our world when life is simple and calm. If plunging into the thick of action can draw us away from our centre and source, it is the meeting of performance and alignment that permits accomplishment in action.

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FUNDAMENTALS OF PERFORMANCE & ALIGNMENT

That is also why we have called this book ‘When Performance Meets Alignment’. That meeting takes place at the centre and source of both performance and alignment at the heart of our awareness. From there, it is possible for action to be in accord with our deep nature while strengthening our alignment. When performance springs from alignment, while naturally reinforcing it, it is like a beautiful dance arising from the perfect poise of a consummate dancer. The dance itself deepens and intensiﬁ es the natural poise from which it emerged.

These fundamental principles are vital to development facilitation. Coaching means nurturing the roots of both performance and alignment, being sensitive to the way in which the client passes in and out of balance. As development facilitators we are concerned with whether the client can conceive and hold a direction. Is he or she connected to self, others, and context? Is the client connected to his or her inner life and creative source? Can he or she fulﬁ l desires and achieve results in the world?

The Fundamentals of Performance and Alignment are vital also for the development facilitator. In working with clients, the coach needs to be inwardly aligned, at home in the body, earthy and real, yet able to conceive

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abstraction. An effective coach is stable and predictable, yet creative and able to surprise the client. Head and heart are in balance, rooted in a solid sense of self, yet open to that which transcends the personal. The coach can offer the client more, if he or she works from a place of poise, balanced between insight and expression. The development facilitator needs to hold a direction while respecting what emerges and ﬂows in the relationship with the client. In short, an effective coach is likely to be a model of the kind of integration that he or she is helping the client evolve towards.

The Way of Unfolding compass provides pointers towards a process of integration that is unfolding in our own lives. It also helps us hone in on the process of unfolding in others, alerting us to important areas for attention.

In the following chapters, we will explore how the Fundamentals of Performance and Alignment are reﬂected in the development of both client and facilitator – as a process unfolding over time and as different levels of that process of transformation, as we change, learn, grow at any particular moment. We will elaborate progressive layers of the compass as we progress through the book, both as a summary of what we are presenting and as pointers to a deeper understanding of the process of unfolding as a whole.

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TWO

CHANGE, LEARNING, AND GROWTH

We face, then, two great stochastic systems that are partly in interaction and partly isolated from each other. One system is within the individual and is called learning; the other is immanent in heredity and in populations and is called evolution. One is a matter of the single lifetime; the other is a matter of multiple generations of many individuals.

The task . . . is to show how these two stochastic systems, working at different levels of logical typing, ﬁt together into a single ongoing biosphere that could not endure if either somatic or genetic change were fundamentally different from what it is.

The unity of the combined system is necessary.

G. BATESON, Mind and Nature

INTRODUCTION

Alignment with the Way of Unfolding means deepening our relationship with the patterns of transformation present in nature, our social environment, and ourselves. The fabric of nature is, in a deep sense, utterly alive. And we are an intimate part of that fabric, both weavers of it and woven into it. Careful observation of the patterns of life suggests that these can be considered generative – self-evolving and self-unfolding – through an unceasing dance among tendencies towards stability and change, leavened with a miraculous dose of self-transcendence.

As part and parcel of the patterns of nature, our own lives also exhibit a self-unfolding interplay among tendencies to change and tendencies to stay the same. We experience this unfolding directly as we change, learn, and grow over time. Through these processes, the need for stability and continuity and the need to adapt creatively unfold from the cradle to the grave. Through change, learning, and growth, the patterns of our own lives become generative, as the myriad possibilities of human life are manifest in so many creative and unexpected ways.

To use a simple analogy, we may compare the process of change to giving hungry islanders some ﬁsh. Receiving ﬁsh may represent a change in their lives, but it does not alter much. Teaching them how to catch ﬁsh enfolds the change in a wider context. It creates an important shift in their internal world. New possibilities open through that mysterious process we call ‘learning’. As learning deepens it permits a further shift. From merely being able to ﬁsh, they become ﬁshermen. Fishing becomes part of them. With this shift, the learning leads to growth in the person as a whole. This shift brings a degree of wisdom around ﬁshing – when and where it is appropriate and how to have a right relationship with wind and sea and ﬁ sh.

CHANGE

Many approaches to human development attach great importance to change. People may also long for change in their lives – particularly if they are dissatisﬁed with their job, their partner, their environment, or with themselves. The need for change can become a constant in the lives of organizations, families, and individuals. Change and stability, however, form an indissoluble pair of tendencies that any living system needs to survive and ﬂourish. These twin qualities ensure that we often ﬁ nd our attempts at change accompanied by a counterbalancing tendency to stay the same. Resistance to change is a common expression of the interplay between these two tendencies. A person, a family, or a whole company may ask for help to change. But their request can also be a way of asking to stay as they are.

In complex systems, the tendencies towards stability and change interact on many different levels at once. For instance, when someone moves to another part of the country to take up a new job, the physical move will often be made quickly. Settling in, adjusting, putting down roots in the new area, may take much longer. Change on one level is counterbalanced by greater stability on other levels of the person’s life, while the changes on those levels are gradually assimilated.

Deliberate choices involving change can thus only be made when we acknowledge – whether consciously or unconsciously – some elements of stability that can help maintain balance in the system. For instance,

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when a couple marry, they opt for a radical change in their personal lives and their social standing. Becoming a stable couple requires some ways in which the uniqueness of each partner’s family background, career, interests, and pattern of development can have a place.

Often we do not choose change, or we believe we have no choice. People convince themselves that they have to change, for all kinds of reasons – pressure from family, friends, colleagues, employers, or simple irresistible frustration, and so on. The need for change often appears to arise from extraneous circumstances, such as external events or previous history that interfere with our getting what we want. In such cases, we feel that our dynamic equilibrium has been disturbed, and we start a process of adjusting outer circumstances or ourselves, in order to recover the state of balance that was present before. Change ceases to be something that we desire, but a way of re-establishing the coherence of our own system. In that sense, the need for change is triggered by a difference, or change, outside of our control that we try to bring within our ﬁ eld of control. This process can turn our lives into a battleﬁeld, whether we are struggling with some part of ourselves (mostly considered as something that is not really ‘us’) or with someone or something that we consider outside ourselves.

The beauty of change lies in the art of control. There is an art to being proactive in the areas where our inﬂuence and process of assimilation is both possible and desirable. Change becomes ugly when we inappropriately strive for control – when we force ourselves, others or nature to do exactly what we want. Then we also ﬁnd ourselves tilting at windmills. There is a popular prayer, which begins: ‘God, give me the strength to change the things I can change, and the willingness to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference between the two.’ This prayer encapsulates what we mean by giving change its rightful place in our lives, and no more.

Change in our lives has a place, but also limits. We can change the position of a rock in a river, the decoration in our home, or the rhythm of our breathing. Such examples suggest two orders of change, namely, changes in context and changes in patterns of behaviour. We attempt contextual and behavioural change when we perceive elements of our experience to be affecting us, and subject to our inﬂ uence.

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When we are confronted with something inside or outside ourselves that is as capable of inﬂuencing us as we are of inﬂuencing it, the process of change becomes slippery. In complex systems, the direction of inﬂ uence becomes circular. For instance, a parent may try to control the behaviour of a child, while the child turns out to have a mind of its own and can also inﬂuence its parents. In such situations, to maintain the illusion of a unidirectional inﬂuence, we have to delete portions of our experience. The parent starts negating part of the child’s experience or vice versa. When we do succeed in engineering some change in another

– or even in ourselves – the actual process is far more complex than we usually acknowledge. For instance, between a parent and a child, the exchange may involve aspects of the hopes, fears, and values of each in ways that may be hard to unravel and describe. If the parents say they have controlled the child’s behaviour, they may be seriously deluding themselves as to what actually happened in the child’s internal world. The child’s motives for acquiescing may be quite different from what the parents imagine. And the long-term effects of the child’s acquiescence may be diametrically opposed to what the parent ultimately would wish for the child.

When we delete or distort the complexity of what has actually happened in the changes we think we have created, we open the door to a great deal of ugliness – such as we witness in the crude application of state policies in many countries. Tyranny, torture, abductions, or simply the heavy-handed application of normal state policy can so easily destroy the lives of ordinary people. Such ugliness always arises from some dislocation from the pattern which connects.

For this reason our relationship to change needs to be sensitive or we risk destroying what we wish to nurture. Once an Indonesian friend shared with us a little story about how her dog died suddenly when she was ten years old. She had been very close to the animal and so she buried him in a special place in the backyard. To celebrate their friendship she planted a little bush on top of the place where her dog was buried. The plant grew and soon she could enjoy the ﬂowers, which were surprisingly beautiful. One day she felt the desire to have these ﬂ owers and the memory of her dog closer to her. So she decided to put the plant in a pot and placed it in her bedroom, close to the window. Immediately, the plant became

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miserable and, in no time, died. All her attempts over the years to ﬁ nd another plant of the same kind failed.

As to the authors, when we were discussing the relationship of change, learning, and growth, we were surprised to realize that, although we had experience with a number of personal development disciplines in which change is highly desired, in the ten years we had known each other, neither of us had really changed that much. While the lack of change surprised us, we both felt that we had learned a lot. We could also discern growth in each other, though in many respects, it was quite subtle and hard to pinpoint. We sensed growth most of all in our own self-perception, rather more strongly than we recognized it in the other. We felt we were still essentially the same people to each other, but we sensed a rounding-out and maturing of the person.

Change was harder to identify. We could see that we had physically changed in a decade, though we would have had little trouble recognizing each other in the street after a long absence. We felt we had made many important, even dramatic, changes in externals, such as in the work we did, where we lived, or in our partnerships and family set-ups. We had made minor changes in our patterns of behaviour. But other changes in basic patterns to do with eating, drinking, sleeping, thinking, relating, and so on had proved remarkably intractable. Our conclusion was that, in many respects, we had not really changed at all. We were still pretty much the same people, a little older, but still displaying the same kind of qualities as when our friendship began, still grappling with the same kind of personality traits and tendencies as before, still boxing with the same shadows.

When we considered other people – whether family, friends, colleagues, or clients – we found the same picture. No matter what the books or pundits may propound, people do not change much. Any radical changes that we sometimes observed seemed to accompany major turning points in people’s lives, such as a crisis or some kind of spiritual conversion. But even there, where the changes seemed abundant, the people had not really changed. It seemed that even the propensity to change was somehow already present in who they were. The changes that occurred were more like the pruning of a tree or the sprucing up of a child for a party, a renewal in externals that simply revealed more of their essence, rather than a change in the person themselves. It would seem that in most circumstances, people

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do not change. But they can and do learn and grow, while their lives as a whole suggest a natural evolutionary process.

We ﬁnd that the push for change is often misplaced, applied to the wrong logical level, as when we say ‘you’ve got to change’, directing the charge to change at the person, rather than at their behaviour. When we seek change, we might rather be curious as to what would support growth or unfolding in our lives, or to consider what we might need to learn. Then we will know what kind of behavioural or contextual changes will support our learning and growth.

LEARNING

We can deﬁne learning in many ways, such that potentially it covers an enormous range of experience. For instance, Bateson’s model of learning goes all the way from a complete absence of learning, characterized by habit and conditioned responses, to the possibility of knowing the cosmic unfolding of our universe from the inside in ways far beyond the possibilities of our nervous systems. But the term ‘learning’ seems particularly apt for the middle domain involving the acquirement of new skills and capabilities. Whereas change primarily occurs in our external

or environmental circumstances and in our basic actions and behaviours, learning involves the organizing mind. It has much to do with memory, understanding, and integration of new capacities, with the unfolding of know-how, not only intellectually, but also affectively and relationally.

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Learning broadens our ﬁeld of experience. It enables us to manage increasingly complex patterns of similarity and difference in what we perceive. With its drive for simplicity and coherence, it helps us accommodate complexity, boosting the connections and relationships available to our mind.

Our conscious and unconscious patterning is an intimate part of our learning. Learning to walk offers a beautiful example of how children detect patterns. They pick up patterns to do with the function of gravity, the relationship between their hands and their feet, and between their feet and the ground, and so on. At the same time, they are not only physically installing patterns through the micro and macro muscle movements of their little bodies, but developing new patterns of cognition. For instance, they are acquiring a set of beliefs and related associations to do with walking – as opposed to crawling – and the discovery of a new relationship with the world that it brings.

While learning can occur spontaneously with the passage of time, much learning is goal-oriented. Typically, through learning we pass from our present condition to a new state closer to our aspirations. We shift from what we were learning being effectively unavailable to us to the acquisition and integration of a pattern or model. The new learning becomes part of our internal world and is physically wired in at the neurological level, with new synaptic connections in the brain. This process is common to the various kinds of learning – whether learning to walk, to talk, to read, to write poems, to motivate others, or even learning to learn.

And yet there is something rather odd in this process. If learning involves enriching the amount of relationships connected to a particular domain, we can conclude that learning involves a quantitative difference in the state we reach after learning. In effect, the key elements for learning are already available earlier in the process and are ready to combine in more varied ways. A child does not learn to walk, until walking is already in him or her. If we decide to learn Swahili, the possibility of another language is already within us. And as our competence in the language develops, we discover that our passive knowledge always unfolds ahead of what we can actively master.

Learning, then, takes place when we come to a new level of realization of the possibilities already present in our ﬁeld of experience. In the ‘Aha!’

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or ‘Eureka!’ experience, we delight in the emergence of something new and even surprising. We enjoy recognizing a solution we already knew must be available, but which waited before coming to us. In learning, the path we take, in effect, is the only one we can take. It turns out to be the one in which there is the most substantial conﬁrmation of a pattern of relationships towards which we had already been slowly edging.

Sometimes specialists in the ﬁeld of personal development maintain that the needed resources for learning and transformation are already present within the individual (or group, in the case of larger systems).1 To draw on a resource is to rediscover what is already there but which has been somehow forgotten or undeveloped. Learning in this sense does not mean acquiring something new and foreign, but rather realizing possibilities that are already available. In a sense, we only learn what we already know.

For us, this is more than a cheap way of stimulating learning, by re-framing the out-of-reach as if it has already been acquired. Conﬁ dence in our knowing allows us to relax into the kind of not knowing in which what-we-didn’t-know-we-already-knew can emerge. In acquiring a second language, for instance, a certain amount of relaxation is necessary for our latent knowledge of the language – for the half-learnt and half-forgotten vocabulary and syntax – to emerge spontaneously in conversation. The strategy of doing ‘as if’ we can already do what we are pretending to do thus reﬂ ects a fundamental pattern in learning itself.

If this is so, we may have to reconsider the validity of the popular model of the learning process that suggests that we pass from ‘unconscious incompetence’ (ignorance of our ignorance), to ‘conscious incompetence’ (the realization that we don’t know), to ‘conscious competence’ (knowing that we now know), thence to a ﬁnal phase of mastery or ‘unconscious competence’. For it would seem that we can pass from conscious incompetence to conscious competence only by drawing on unconscious competencies that are already present.

If we compare learning with change, learning is primarily a conservative process. Through learning, we maintain our stability in the face of an impetus towards change. Learning lets us assimilate change without it really changing us. Learning extends our ability to inﬂuence our ﬁ eld of experience with some security. Our integrity and identity generally remain unchallenged in this process. We ﬁnd ways to accommodate and adapt

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to change without changing ourselves. For learning to really change us, learning has to unlearn itself and allow for a new and more comprehensive kind of learning. This we call growth.

In this sense, the notion of a ‘learning organization’ is curiously misplaced. A learning organization seeks self-preservation through adaptation. A learning organization does not necessarily have a capacity for self-renewal. In its focus on learning it primarily seeks to accommodate change. For a learning organization to fulﬁl the aspirations of those who have developed this notion, it must have a capacity for self-transcendence. It must evolve beyond a learning organization and become a growing organization, too (in the qualitative sense, rather than in any quantitative push for proﬁt or size). Then it has the ability truly to take off and enjoy the unfolding of its inherent potentiality.

GROWTH

Learning, thus, widens and makes explicit the level we are currently on. When learning is particularly deep or profound, we pass to another level altogether. This we call growth or development. Put another way, when learning takes place over a long period of time, and involves a readjustment of the very foundations and assumptions that had been characterizing our learning till then, it is more accurate to speak of growth, rather than learning.

Whereas learning tends to involve adjustments within our existing frames, with growth we jump to another level and expand the context and container. Learning can occur without growth, but there is no growth that does not involve some deep process of learning.

For instance, we can say that computers, until now, can learn but not grow. The computer performs quantitative operations on the information available to it. Sometimes it would appear as if quantitative expansion has qualitative implications, as when we say, ‘more is better’ or ‘the more the merrier’. This, however, is an error in our thinking that impacts many of our aims and relationships, fuelling frustration and disappointment. More is not necessarily better. It may even be worse. More is simply more.

Growth, then, is of a higher order than either change or learning, just as self-transcendence is of a higher order than either stability or change.

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Growth is a natural and radical response to the demands of chaos and complexity in our lives. With growth, we pass beyond maintaining the integrity of the existing mould of our lives, to expand the mould itself.

For example, a Canadian journalist in Singapore told us that as a child he had wanted to become Prime Minister. However, he realized that he would never be able to do so, as he was too shy. In an attempt to change this, he enrolled in public speaking and debating clubs and took up many activities with the aim of becoming more extrovert. Eventually, he succeeded in this, although he still felt shy sometimes.

In making this change, he found that he had learnt a great deal, acquiring many new skills. Among other things, he realized that he had also learnt about the process of change itself. To change something in his life, he recognized that he needed to be determined, deciding what he wanted to change and going for it. He realized that it was important not to accept failure as failure, but to hold his intention and try again and again, until he succeeded, repeating the actions he had selected, if they were appropriate, and trying different ones if they were not.

In time, he succeeded in becoming an elected politician, but after a while gave up politics altogether. In attempting to change his basic personality and learning new skills, he found that he had grown and matured beyond his original dream, and it no longer felt right for him. He decided to look for another career and settled on journalism.

Growth, then, occurs on many interconnected levels in our lives. We grow physically. We grow intellectually and emotionally. We grow socially and spiritually. Growth, as we understand it, presupposes a certain alignment between these different levels. For instance, as the body ages, we experience shifts on the other levels too. Popular sayings, such as ‘Before forty you live for others; after forty you start to live for yourself’, reﬂ ect this realization. This particular saying refers to the process of individuation often encountered in one’s forties. The kind of growth we are referring to here has to do with a comprehensive process of becoming in which something essential that was always present, but perhaps experienced more as latent possibility, can emerge, as oak from acorn.

Learning and growth are often confused. Whereas learning involves an extension of our inner resources, with growth we tap the source itself.

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Unlike learning, growth is not really something we can aim for. We can learn actively, but growth tends to happen. At best, we can invite and welcome growth. Growth is an evidence of a self-transcending process in which we do not gain new knowledge in the ordinary sense. Rather, we experience a deepening, a ripening, and an expansion of the self, while we also attain a new level relationship with what we took to be non-self. As long as we aim for growth, our ‘I’ is in the way of the growing, or our perceiving of the process of growing.

Whereas learning is proactive, growth is something we receive. We cannot ‘do’ growth; growth is a gift of life itself. We can, however, support the conditions for growth. Learning, for instance, prepares the ground for growing. Growth means that the relationships explored through learning are sufﬁciently complex or beyond our existing frames of reference that a new level of being is needed to accommodate them.

If learning has to do with the perception and management of pattern, growth implies generative patterns and generative patterning. Whereas change involves the realm of externals and behaviours and deals more with the known, learning concerns their interaction and context, and involves the process of knowing. Growth, in contrast, has to do with the knower and full expression of the whole pattern of our lives.

For those involved in the professions concerned with change or for those seeking personal development, the important question, then, is not ‘How can I or this other person change?’ Rather we should be asking: ‘In what ways is this person’s life inviting growth?’ Such a question helps us attune to the implicit and unique choreography of a person. Then we can ask ‘What do I or this person need to learn that will support such growth?’ And ﬁnally: ‘What kinds of behavioural changes will make such learning

and growth inevitable?’

The simplest kinds of such behavioural change are external – little things we can actually do in the world. In his therapeutic practice, Milton Erickson was a master at anticipating the small behavioural adjustments that would support learning and growth. For instance, in a typical intervention, he asked a reclusive woman whose hobby was cultivating African violets to look through the columns in the local paper of births, deaths, and marriages. He suggested that she send a small pot of violets with a cover note to the family concerned. This led to her developing

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social skills and relationships, such that at her death over a thousand people mourned her. Erickson was able to identify such behavioural tasks that could bring about profound developments in people’s lives, precisely because he was particularly sensitive to the ways in which every aspect of our behaviour is a pointer to the deeper pattern of our lives.

From another angle, we can also try to support learning and growth by aiming for small changes in the subtle inner behaviours implicit in our recurring habits of thinking and perception. Positive thinking and afﬁrmations are relatively crude examples of such an approach. Cognitive therapy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and some forms of hypnotherapy offer examples of more sophisticated attempts to inﬂ uence our internal behaviours, which can be quite successful – as, for example, with methods for quickly reducing phobic or allergic responses.

Unfortunately, disciplines such as NLP also often confuse the domains of change, learning, and growth. Such approaches are most successful when they honour the principle of change at the behavioural level, to support learning and growth at a higher level. They work best when their attempts to initiate change focus on the behavioural level but are connected through a sensitive perception of the contexts of behaviour in the overall pattern of the person’s life. Ideally, they respect the intent of questions such as ‘What is trying to become in this person?’ And ‘What would this person need to learn for this to happen?’ When those questions are present, they provide a wise and supportive context for more behaviourally-oriented questions as to what would make such learning and growth inevitable,

A similar process can support development at the collective level. Questions such as: ‘What is this organization trying to become? Into what is it trying to grow?’ precede our asking what learning is needed for such growth to naturally unfold from it. Then we can identify the behavioural changes that will make such learning inevitable,

Such thinking helps identify the critical threshold beyond which a shift in the system is inevitable. It helps us identify the crucial difference that would impel the whole system to move in the direction of growth and development.

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UNFOLDING

Growth implies an evolution through time. Although growth sometimes occurs in rapid spurts, what happens in a day is usually imperceptible. Growth recalls the other stochastic process at the genetic and species level that Bateson refers to in the quotation at the opening of this chapter. Growth, in that sense, is our way of connecting, not only to personal learning, but also to the process of evolution in nature. Like that process, it implies an unfolding that cannot be predicted in its details, but whose overall pattern, we can often see retrospectively in our history.

As with growth in nature, so there is a coherent progression to our growth. It is connected with, but not conﬁned to, our intellectual development. That larger pattern, which transcends and connects the various phases of growth in our lives, we call ‘unfolding’. It has much to do with our general maturation in the context of the larger unfolding of the pattern which connects.

With the impulse to change, whether it arises from within or is thrust upon us, we ﬁnd ourselves learning in ways that allow us to accommodate change. Our learning also prepares us for further changes in our lives. In the interplay between change and learning, we grow on so many levels and in so many ways. Our growth allows the integration of the changes and learnings we had been experiencing, so that they can become part of ourselves. Together the interaction among change, learning, and growth point to a larger pattern in which what we are both in ourselves and as part of the larger whole unfolds.

GENERATIVE PATTERNS

UNFOLDING

CHANGE

STABILITY

LEARNING

SELF-TRANSCENDENCE

GROWTH

Implicit in our sense of unfolding is the paradox of a kind of protective covering that conceals, but in which everything is already present, shyly readying itself to open up. The egg contains and conceals the chick preparing to peck its way forth. The mother hen warms and shields it, guiding

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it on its ﬁ rst forays into the world. Together hen, egg, and chicken form a larger pattern of unfolding in which it is difﬁcult to say which comes ﬁrst, the change, the learning, or the growth. This pattern is part of the larger unfolding of nature as a whole. Everything that unfolds in the different levels of nature does so through the interplay of change, learning, and growth.

Nature, however, while displaying these elements, does not particularly distinguish among them. That is something we do. And this can be a mixed blessing, as we can become very self-conscious. We need such distinctions for our own unfolding, as one of our characteristics as a species is to become very aware of change, learning, and growth, as they affect us. But this self-consciousness can get in our way, as we attempt to inﬂuence development in ways that we think are appropriate, but may not be. Eventually, however, whether we wish it or not, the larger pattern of unfolding leads us towards letting go of our conscious controlling, to return to the kind of simplicity in which our lives unfold naturally.

Unfolding arises from, and reveals, the implicit teleology of our lives as a whole and its relationship to the larger connecting pattern that transcends us. Little by little we come to be, and allow ourselves to be who we are in the larger scheme of things, as never before. In a sense, we can never be other than who we are. But, at times, it is as if part of who we are obscures our essence to ourselves. It also dislocates us from an alignment with the way things are about us. We can ﬁnd ourselves out of synchrony with the currents of life, swimming upstream, against the ﬂow. Such dissonance is not to be avoided or denied. ‘Ups’ and ‘downs’ are very much part of how the patterns of our life unfold, just as nature itself is often ‘red in tooth and claw’. Through the process of unfolding, we smooth our rough edges. But to do so requires that we face the rough as well as the smooth. A kind of simplicity eventually emerges in us, in which striving yields to a way of being that is accepting and at one with itself and with the larger pattern. When this happens, change, learning, and growth take care of themselves. We ﬁ nd ﬁrst in moments, then in whole periods of our lives, that we can speak of connecting with the pattern which connects – the self-unfolding alpha and omega implicit in all our changing, learning, and growing.

PART I • ONE • THE ROOTS OF TRANSFORMATION

PART II

CHANGE

THREE

FACILITATING CHANGE

But the opposition of ‘old’ and ‘new’ is genuine, ineradicable, at the centre of what we understand to be experience itself . . . . We are told we must choose – the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?

SUSAN SONTAG, ‘Literature is Freedom’

INTRODUCTION

In the previous chapter, we proposed that change in the human sphere means an alteration in behaviour or context. Change can be self-initiated, as when someone decides to move house or change career. Or it may be driven by events beyond our control. More often, change is a combination of the two. Events in the world call for a new direction without imposing it. In the commercial world this often happens when loss of market share stimulates preventive action.

In our work facilitating development in individuals, the focus these days tends to be more on growth than learning, and more on learning than change. However, it is vital for the development facilitator to be able to assist change, because change may be the priority. Sometimes the development facilitator is called to help with the effects of change imposed from without. Bereavement and redundancy counselling are examples, so too is trauma counselling following a disaster or terrorist attack. Here the primary function of the coach or counsellor is to help the client cope with what is inevitable or has already happened. Coping with change may be all that is required or it may be a ﬁrst step to further learning and eventual growth.

For example, in assisting volunteers in the aftermath of the Bali bombs in October 2002, Peter found, as is common after violent traumatic events, that some people were troubled by recurrent after-images of horrible things they had seen. This was disturbing both their waking and their

sleep. It was a priority for these people to be able to handle these intrusive images. Simple yet powerful methods from NLP helped them neutralize the traumatic images and recover a more normal state of mind.

The development facilitator also needs to be able to assist change because, even where the issues have more to do with learning or growth, an element of change is still involved. For example, one young female volunteer Peter worked with after the Bali bombs summed up her difﬁ culties by saying: ‘How can I live in a world where people do such things to one another?’ In this instance, Peter needed to help her reframe her experience, so that she could understand it in a way that allowed her to continue to live with meaning and purpose. This process involved subtle inner changes, as she shifted her perceptual focus from immediate events to a broader time span, considering the events as part of the larger frame of development of our species. Events such as the bombing could be seen as part of the erratic evolution of our planet from violence towards greater wisdom. Such shifts in focus allowed her to understand what happened in more helpful ways and accept it as part of the unfolding pattern of what is.

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INTENTION

Consciously chosen change involves three important elements: intention, attention, and action. Intention provides a goal, attention monitors progress, and action performs the steps to its realization.

Intention functions as a stability point in relation to change. It sets the direction for both conscious and unconscious minds. To set intention effectively, the desired change needs to be formulated in positive terms, specifying what is wanted, rather than what is not wanted. Research suggests that the mind handles negatives by ﬁ rst representing what is to be negated and then negating it. If we say ‘I don’t want to be so tense’, our message to the mind fails to give a clear direction. We may even increase tension, as the mind registers the notion of tension before negating it. The internal message is understood as: ‘I want tension, not’.

Besides expressing our intention in terms of what we want, it is important to formulate it in as clear and precise terms as possible. The mind tends to respond strongly to sensory images. If we can specify what we want in a way that allows us to imagine it clearly, the conscious mind grasps it more fully. At the same time, it is easier for the unconscious mind to take it on board.

These simple points have been well articulated in the basic training of NLP. They may appear obvious, but it is surprising how difﬁ cult individuals and even whole cultures ﬁnd them. Even articulate and aware people may ﬁnd it easier to think in terms of what they do not want, rather than what they do. Many people, who understand this point well and generally apply it in their lives, can still ﬁnd themselves wanting to be rid of unpleasant challenges and unclear about what they want instead.

Effective development facilitators assist clients in formulating clear outcomes for change. This innocuous-sounding exercise is surprisingly complex and requires considerable training and practice to perform skilfully. However, most of the essential points are thoroughly covered in the primary literature of NLP and in the standard Practitioner Training.2

Specifying our intentions well has other advantages. Knowing clearly what we want enables us to determine whether we really do want it. It ﬂushes out objections, arising from recognizing what our intention may cost us. Most intentions carry a price tag, whether in terms of things that we have to give up to achieve them, the effort and expense in attaining

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them, or what they ask of us once we have achieved them. Moving to a larger house, for instance, may be a dream. But it also generally means less available capital, years of hard work to pay off a mortgage, and more ongoing cleaning and maintenance. Similarly, a promotion can be an achievement, but it may take a lot of effort to earn, and once attained may demand much of us in terms of extra commitment of time and energy.

Our intentions need to be acceptable not only to the conscious, but to the unconscious mind. Our conscious and other than conscious minds may not always be in alignment. The unconscious mind has its own agenda from previous programming. And this agenda may be quite different from that implicit in even quite innocuous intentions.

It is the function of other than conscious parts of our minds to store the results of prior learning and use it in the future to guide behaviour, so that we do not repeat past mistakes. Unfortunately, some of that learning is no longer helpful in situations where it is applied subsequently. A common example is in the fear of speaking in public. Old embarrassments from home or school may paralyse a perfectly competent adult who needs to share information with others. Unless the programming of the other than conscious parts of the mind is taken into account in attempting change, it may continue to interfere with the realization of valuable outcomes.

For this reason, in facilitating change, we ﬁnd that it is helpful not only to ask the client, ‘What do you want?’ and expect a very clear answer to this question, but to ask: ‘And how is what you want something that you do not want?’ This kind of question ﬂushes out some of the so-called

‘secondary gains’ or side-beneﬁts of things staying as they are, as well as the potential price of change. Unless these are addressed, the desired change may never happen. In NLP many simple techniques have been developed for establishing communication with apparently unhelpful parts of the psyche and negotiating ways to satisfy their often legitimate intentions. When this is done the desired change can be realized.

Once we have a clear intention that is acceptable to the person as a whole, handing the desired change over to the unconscious mind is an effective way of ensuring its realization. In relaxed ‘alpha’ or meditative states we can give our consciously conceived intentions to the mind as a whole. We can imagine the desired intention as something that is already achieved. We

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can also imagine achieving important milestones on the way. Once our unconscious mind understands and accepts our desire, our personal resources mobilize towards its realization. We ﬁ nd achievement is much easier.

ATTENTION

Setting intention is an important ﬁrst step to making a change, but it is not enough by itself to ensure success. We also need to know whether we are progressing towards realizing our intention and, eventually, whether we have achieved it or not. When we set our intention clearly, we are in effect specifying what will let us know that we have achieved it. But the actual monitoring of progress requires attention.

Attention connects intention and action. If intention sets the direction for how we use our body and mind, attention provides feedback as to whether our actions are effective or not. Through attention, we can monitor our experience so as to recognize how far we are matching or diverging from the realization of our intentions. Attention helps us realize too when other conﬂicting intentions from our past or present come into play, so that we can decide what to do about them.

Monitoring feedback on our progress means directing our attention appropriately. Awareness is that within which all our experience is reﬂected, the subtle receptor of our knowing. Attention, in contrast, is activated awareness directed towards different kinds of knowing. If the nearest analogy to awareness is the mirror or stretch of still water with its reﬂecting surface and mysterious depths, attention is more like the beam of light we shine in the dark to illuminate our way. The mirror of awareness remains essentially constant and invariant. Attention, in contrast, is elastic. Through attention we focus, shape, and direct awareness in order to perceive and know different aspects of our experience.

Attention functions primarily through our senses. But the emphasis accorded to the different sensory channels may vary. This can be important. According to the change we want to make, we may need to give more weight to what we see, to what we hear, or to what we feel.

Within the different sensory channels, the way we focus can also vary. For instance, we may favour inner or outer experience. This basic orientation can affect our ability to realize our intentions. If we are too focused

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on inner experience, we may not notice what is happening around us. If we are too taken with external experience, we may not notice inner signals that let us know how we are doing. Attention needs to be directed appropriately for the task.

Even within the broad frame of inner and outer experience, the scope of attention varies considerably. The beam of attention can be either pencil-sharp or diffuse and encompassing, just as the spotlights at a theatre can illuminate a small part of the stage or embrace the whole.3 Whether our attention is functioning with a very broad or narrow focus can affect our ability to achieve a simple behavioural goal. For instance, registering shifts in facial expression or voice tone can make a vital difference to the quality of communication skills.

Besides these process variables, attention can also be directed to notice particular content on various levels of our experience: from the world around us to our relationship with it, from our senses to our emotions and thoughts, or how things are affecting us personally.

If we notice how the client focuses attention during a session, we may recognize patterns that would render the client more effective if they were adjusted. Patterns of attention in the session may indicate ways in which the client generally misses information relevant to his or her goals. For instance, difﬁculty in facing the change-facilitator may be connected to difﬁculty in connecting with others. Excessive focus on the message to be delivered and too little attention as to how it is being received may reﬂect general communication difﬁculties. Providing appropriate feedback on how to orient the attention can make all the difference in the client’s ability to effect change in his or her behaviour.

Our attention does not simply monitor how we progress towards the realization of particular outcomes; its functioning is shaped continuously by our intentions. Intention inﬂuences both what we ﬁlter for and the ﬁltering process itself. Intention has a role in orienting us, for instance, towards inner or outer, wide or narrow focus, as well as towards particular content. Intention sets the parameters for what we will select and reject among the potentially bewildering variety of experience. Failure to notice important feedback in our experience may reﬂect less an inability to attend and more an inappropriate bias in our intentions. Reorienting the attention is thus an important part of setting intention.

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Sometimes the feedback provided by the failure to orient attention properly can be brutal and immediate. Much of what is termed ‘human error’ in serious accidents can be traced to momentary lapses of attention. Often such lapses of attention may reﬂect a conﬂict among our intentions.

Curiously, during the revision of this very chapter, we were reminded of the price of even small moments of inattention. At one point, we inadvertently unplugged an external drive from our computer without ﬁ rst shutting it down, thereby irretrievably corrupting a revised draft of this material. The irony of losing our work on the topic of attention in this way was inescapable. We were rather painfully reminded of the importance of attention to even simple tasks!

ACTION

To effect change, we need a clear intention, the ability to monitor progress, and also some concrete steps for achieving the intended outcome.

Many behavioural changes merely involve doing what we have decided. Often, however, there is an important mental component. In learning new physical behaviours, mental rehearsal is as important as actual practice. Improving a tennis serve, a golf swing, or dance steps goes much faster if we can practice internally with imagery as well as physically.

Introducing a new behaviour may also require adjusting our patterns of mind to initiate or support that action. For example, we may need a mental trigger to remind us to carry out the desired behaviour. To improve communication with colleagues we might have decided to initiate conversation with them, by asking them friendly questions, or by smiling more often. By setting our intention in advance, we can programme our unconscious to remind us of what we want to do.

In some areas of change, it may be that there is an inner obstacle, such as fear or conﬂicting needs that must be managed. For instance, due to fear of rejection a salesman may put off important calls. One way to inﬂ uence this pattern might be for the salesman to prepare his or her internal state before making the calls. This could involve creating a simple routine, with helpful imagery and internal dialogue or something more focused on posture or breathing.

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It may be that what we are changing is not particularly visible in the world, but actually a way of thinking or habit of mind. When we are dealing with phobias, irrational fears, or other unwanted responses, it is really a shift in subtle inner behaviours that is involved.

Many simple internal skills can be analysed in terms of repeated patterns of intention, internal actions, and attention to monitor whether the outcome was achieved or not. This structure holds true of the basic mental strategies individuals use for memorization, motivation, decision-making, and so on. Sometimes, analysing and updating such patterns may be an important element in facilitating change in clients whose performance is suffering.

Rote learning, for instance, aims at memorization, rather than understanding. Rote learning may not be a particularly deep form of learning, but it has a place in the retention of facts and details. Such learning is learning on the level of change. Rote learning involves simple external or internal actions, such as repetition, to effect a basic mental change. Sometimes the patterns of steps we typically use are ineffective and we forget easily. Modifying these steps in an appropriate way can enhance memory. Many popular mnemonic techniques merely involve adjusting inner behaviours in ways that are already natural to those with good memories.

A client of Peter’s requested help in improving his memory of people’s names. It transpired that his wife remembered people’s names effortlessly and could even recall them long afterwards. Working as a senior accountant he remembered ﬁ gures easily, but names escaped him. Each digit had a personal quality for him. He was interested in them. Unlike his wife, he was not particularly interested in people. But in meeting people professionally, failing to remember their names was becoming an embarrassment.

In our work together, we found that if he had the intention to be more interested in people and hence to give them fuller attention, as he did with numbers, this already helped him remember their names. Other helpful adjustments consisted in him listening more carefully to people’s names and using the associative abilities he had with numbers on the names themselves to make them more memorable. These adjustments to his internal patterns of behaviour helped him towards realizing his intention.

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Even where the issues being explored have more to do with growth, some speciﬁc changes in mental processing may be called for. One of Peter’s clients commented that things which used to generate enormous enthusiasm in her had lost their appeal. She felt she was passing into a new phase in her life, but was not sure what this might bring, as she did not know what really interested her any more.

One thing she realized was that her self-image was much younger than her actual age. She felt she needed to adjust her self-image to be more in accordance with her present phase in life. The term ‘self-image’

LIFE DYNAMICS

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is not just an abstract label to describe how we perceive ourselves. It refers literally to the often unconscious images we use to maintain our personal coherency.4 Adjusting her self-image meant making a small, but signiﬁcant change in internal experience. This internal adjustment helped her keep pace both with physical changes in her life and her own growth as a person.

INNOCENCE

Besides clear intention, well-directed attention, and appropriate action, change is supported by a vital fourth element, which we call ‘innocence’. Innocence is the quality of creative openness, in which new possibilities can emerge. The ﬁrst inkling of an important change often emerges almost imperceptibly deep within our awareness. Responding to those stirrings is often the source of important and valuable change in our lives.

Once we have set an intention, our innocence helps us realize it in a fuss-free way. Innocence welcomes the new. Children are highly adaptable and this has a lot to do with their natural innocence. They are more open to the present moment and ready to accept whatever comes up than adults. A child learns to walk and talk with a lot of innocence, letting these abilities develop in their own time and practising them without much fuss and bother, simply noticing and trying things out when it suits. When we can approach tasks with innocence they are much easier to accomplish. Our attention is particularly receptive to feedback, yet not overwhelmed or discouraged by it. Problems become opportunities for further progress.

Innocence means having the right balance in holding a direction and being receptive to inﬂuences from outside. Sometimes the trigger to a fresh and creative insight comes from within. However, often a chance encounter or some helpful suggestion or advice opens our attention to something we may have been neglecting. If we are too open to external inﬂuences we may lose our direction. But if we are too closed we may miss important opportunities for the new.

Sometimes innocent recognition of an unusual coincidence or a serendipitous event in the outside world may trigger some internal realignment in our approach to a problem. Signs and omens, Jung’s synchronicity,

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may be a reﬂ ection in the wider ﬁ eld of a pattern of events of which we are part. Sometimes, such events awaken our innocence to a sense of curiosity and wonder. At other times, it is as if our innocence not only allows us to notice important connections, but almost to create them.

In working with others, recognition of unusual coincidences during a session may be as important in gaining new insight as being receptive to odd hints and unexpected responses that arise spontaneously from within.

With innocence, we can often accomplish amazing feats. In our innocence, we are not put off by the impossible. When we are innocently open, we are close to the deep pattern in the ﬁeld of which we are part. Blind to impossibility, we ﬁnd that improbable help arises. It is as if the ﬁeld itself organizes the realization of what we want. When we trust fully, we do not place obstacles in the way to our intention.

The global computer company, Apple, like many high tech success stories, grew out of the innocent enthusiasm of two young men starting a company in their garage. From an initial innocence, things developed in a natural way. Companies such as Apple and Hewlett-Packard also grew because they maintained a climate in which employees could stay close to that creative innocence. A relaxed, informal, and open atmosphere was deliberately cultivated to attract creative people and stimulate innovation.

Innocence means being receptive to what comes up inside us. Sometimes this may mean attending to ideas or suggestions that do not necessarily make complete sense. But we recognize that there is something important in them calling for our attention. If we are not careful it can be easy to override or ignore these gifts from deeper parts of ourselves. And this can be a pity

The Maharishi (the Beatles’ guru in the 1960s) described how, after the death of his master, he enjoyed a reclusive life in the Himalayas for some years. At a certain point, however, he became aware of a thought stirring in the silence: ‘Go to Rameshwaram’ (a place with a famous temple in southern India). This faint thought kept returning periodically. Eventually, he yielded to this impulse and set off for southern India, without knowing why he was going or what would happen. This innocent departure initiated a chain of events, which changed the direction of his life and that of many others in the following years.

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Just before returning to the Himalayas, he was invited to give a series of lectures by a stranger and he agreed, although he had not done that kind of thing before. Those who came not only wanted to hear him talk, they wanted to learn how they could experience what he was describing in their own lives. As a result, he began teaching meditation. Towards the end of this series of lectures, when he was again about to return to the Himalayas, he spoke to a large group of people and summed up the beneﬁts that he found people had received from his method of meditation. Spontaneously, he found himself saying that with this approach it should be possible to spiritually regenerate the whole world. This comment roused such a huge wave of applause that it felt like an endorsement from nature itself. From those innocent beginnings, one man, without any ﬁ nancial resources or particular experience in the world, but with a lot of innocence and trust, came down from the mountains to found a worldwide organization reaching thousands of people.

When we approach change in this way, what might otherwise be a daunting challenge can unfold naturally in exciting and unexpected directions.

INTENTION, ATTENTION, ACTION, AND INNOCENCE – A SYSTEMIC WHOLE

NLP, as developed in the late 1970s, quickly grew into arguably one of the most systematic and powerful approaches to change ever conceived. However, people quickly noticed that even skilful application of its methods did not always result in the intended outcome. This stimulated two important developments in the 1980s. One of these was New Code NLP developed by John Grinder and Judith Delozier.

Grinder and Delozier’s work extended NLP by exploiting the systemic relationship between intention, attention, action, and innocence. Alteration in any one of these variables automatically affects all the others as they are all interconnected as a whole. Whereas classic NLP had given pride of place to intention, supported by attention and action, New Code NLP reversed this hierarchy, emphasizing heightened states of body and mind, and attention training. Grinder and Delozier observed that simple rituals (such as certain kinds of synchronized movement and coordination

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drills) led to a more integrated and alert state of body and mind. These open states naturally shifted the focus of attention in ways that resolved problematic patterns of thinking directly, sometimes instantly exploding limiting thoughts and perceptions. It is almost impossible to hold such ideas in an optimized state of awareness. Grinder and Delozier’s work both demonstrated the enormous power of states of innocence and stimulated people to recognize and cultivate such states. Their work was complementary to previous developments, reafﬁrming the powerful way that intention, attention, action, and innocence impact each other. New Code NLP, however, essentially remained in the frame of the basic parameters of change.

In the other important development, Robert Dilts began exploring the inﬂuence of beliefs. Dilts realized that to effect change, it may be necessary to involve other levels of experience than simple intention, attention, action, and innocence. Learning about change leads to learning about learning.

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PART III

LEARNING

FOUR

FROM CHANGE TO LEARNING

Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.

GREGORY BATESON

BEYOND CHANGE

Just as there is a close relationship between the dynamics of behavioural change and the processes of rote learning, so these basic processes are both inﬂ uenced by more complex levels of learning.

For example, the vagaries of written English make spelling a nightmare for some people. Such difﬁculties are not random. The mental patterns one uses to spell determine whether one spells well or badly. Typically, poor spellers rely on the auditory channel to remember spelling. This approach does not work well for English, which is not written phonetically. People who use the visual channel generally spell better.

When poor spellers learn to use Robert Dilts’ Spelling Strategy – a visual method – their spelling improves. However, some people can barely try the technique. In one instance, a client of Dilts recognized that the method could be helpful, but could not bring himself to use it. It turned out that to spell well would mean ‘being like him.’ ‘Him’ in this instance turned out to be a feared and hated teacher who had terrorized him at a certain point in his education.

Although rote memorization ostensibly involves simple repetitive procedures, it quickly leads to another order of complexity. People rarely learn in a mechanical way for very long before they begin to make generalizations about the processes they are using. They notice patterns in what they are doing and ﬁnd ways of simplifying or reﬁ ning them. In effect, they learn about how they are learning.

At the same time, they make generalizations about the signiﬁ cance of what they are doing and whether it is appropriate or even possible for

them. These generalizations, or beliefs as they are called in NLP, provide the principles and rules governing responses to similar situations in the future. They determine what we consider possible or impossible, desirable or to be avoided.

The kind of interference we described with respect to the Spelling Strategy can disrupt any simple behavioural change we attempt. What people term ‘resistance’ is really the continuing impact of past learning. Unless these other levels of generalization are addressed, even simple adjustments to our behaviour and habitual thinking can be virtually impossible.

Every development facilitator encounters instances where the presenting request is ostensibly for simple change, but turns out to involve much more. For instance, a massage therapist asked Peter to help him learn how to modulate his voice better. Further clariﬁcation revealed that, faced with authority ﬁgures, he became tense and his voice shrill. In effect he was asking for coaching to maintain a more relaxed physiology and a deeper voice tone with such people. However, the roots of his difﬁ culties lay in early experiences with his father who had been aggressive with him. This had led to him separating himself from others by creating an inner distance. Under pressure this collapsed and he began to talk at people rather than with them. It become clear that he was really seeking a relaxed openness in which he felt connected to the person he was dealing with. While the presenting issue had to do with change, its deeper ramiﬁ cations involved updating old learning about himself and others and growth into a wider self, free to take its place in the world and hold its own opinions and values.

Being an effective development facilitator means being able to sort different levels of human experience. It means understanding the impact of these different levels on each other and knowing how to help realign them appropriately.

THE UNFOLDING OF THE INTELLECT AND MULTI-LEVELLED THINKING

As human beings, we can attend to what we are experiencing at the sensory level, or we can use our senses as part of higher order cogni

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tive processes. We can focus directly on sensory experience in the world around us – what we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste – or we can reﬂ ect on those perceptions. We see the sunset and have thoughts and feelings about what we see, either at the time or afterwards through memory.

That part of ourselves which recognizes and labels our sensory experience – particularly through language – we call ‘mind’. But mind itself is also capable of doubling up upon itself. Part of the mind can sift, sort, compare, contrast, analyse, synthesize, and evaluate its own cognitions. We can consider not only the sunset we are seeing, as the sun goes down over the ocean, but compare it to the sunset of yesterday, or some other time and place. We can reﬂect on the thoughts we are having about the sunset, whether they are appropriate, how they are similar or different to our usual ponderings, or what they might mean for our life.

That part of the mind which discriminates among its own contents we term ‘intellect’, with Latin roots meaning to ‘choose between’. An equivalent Sanskrit term is ‘buddhi’, with the notion of awakened mind, hence ‘Buddha’, the Awakened One. With the term ‘intellect’ we refer to that aspect of the mind which is involved in sorting experience, determining its meaning and importance, and selecting and guiding our actions in response to events in the world.

We call the ability to handle different levels of experience ‘multi-levelled thinking’. Multi-levelled thinking embraces the full range of experience from simple perception to the sophisticated use of mind and intellect in sorting and evaluating our experience. It develops with the ability to learn.

For Bateson, there are contexts in which we do not really learn at all. We simply respond automatically to a stimulus. Bateson calls this Zero Learning. While we can sometimes ﬁnd ourselves stuck in unchanging responses, generally we do change and adapt. We begin to try new behaviours, some of which become options available to us. Mind also enables us to recognize and label our experience. We learn the names of things; we memorize information – such as the times of trains or our phone number. Such rote learning gives us some freedom, allowing us to manage aspects of our experience by naming and remembering it as simple facts. Bateson calls such simple mental or behavioural change Level One learning.

From such experiences, however, we tend to generalize about when, where, and how to repeat or extend our learning. We learn how to achieve

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simple changes and how to go about rote learning. This enables us to acquire more complex skills and develop knowledge about our own strengths and limitations. Bateson calls this Level Two learning.

What we have termed the intellect is essential for this new level of learning. The intellect uses ‘mind’ to enable us to evaluate our thoughts, and to think about our thinking. If Level One learning corresponds to the mechanical acquisition of mental and behavioural responses, with Level Two learning we make generalizations about how to learn. We develop insight and understanding about the processes we have used and need to use in the future, and also about our own capacity to use them. We deﬁ ne our own strengths and limitations in terms such as ‘I am good at communicating’ or ‘I am patient’, ‘I am clever’, or ‘I can’t speak in public’, ‘I am a weak person’, and so on. In a sense, we shape the contours of our own self. As we do so, we no longer learn mechanically, but strategically. We no longer simply respond at the behavioural level. We develop skills and capabilities to organize our experience. We begin to identify when and where to apply the learning skills we have acquired, as well as situations to avoid.

Developmental psychologists suggest that intellectual development is natural and systematic, but by no means automatic. As Ken Wilber has pointed out, the various developmental models describe a similar underlying pattern. They suggest a natural unfolding from simple automatic responses to the environment to higher intellectual functions. Wilber argues convincingly that the spectrum of personal development leads ﬁrst towards the more reﬁned uses of the mind – which he calls ‘vision logic’ – and then naturally and in a systematic fashion on towards various transpersonal modes of experience. The steps are common, but few people progress through them all.

Along similar lines, Bateson suggests that the frame of Level Two learning is provided by the notion of an individual self. Level Two learning implies learning about the contexts of Level One learning. That context is ultimately provided by the self and our estimation of its abilities and limitations. It takes a qualitatively higher order of learning, which he calls Level Three learning, to outframe it. When this happens, the matrix of self-deﬁnition is transcended at a higher level of learning, as we learn to recognize, and identify with, the open dimensions of experience beyond our self-concepts, which are always limiting in some way.

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For Bateson, transcending the conﬁnes of the deﬁned self of Level Two learning is a perilous process. Going beyond the safe boundaries marked out by our self-labelling can lead, he asserts, either to psychosis or Satori. In the latter, healthier adaptation, we discover there is no ‘real’ self, for ‘the resolution of contraries reveals a world in which personal identity merges into all the processes of relationship in some vast ecology or aesthetic of cosmic interaction . . . Every detail of the universe is seen as proposing a view of the whole.’5 There is an apparent self, but this self is actually only one possible locus or node in a network of relationships of potentially cosmic proportions. Such learning, Bateson suggests, is rare, but accounts of experience of it (and experience, not concept, is crucial here) abound among the innocent and the wise of every age and culture. From the perspective of the larger whole – the ‘necessary unity’ of mind and nature – separate selves are potentialities for enacting the ultimately inﬁnite possibilities within itself, what Coleridge termed ‘the repetition in the ﬁnite mind of the eternal act of creation in the inﬁnite I AM’. Separate selves are in a sense nodes or modes of attention taken by Mind-at-large.

Development of the intellect is crucial to both the personal and transpersonal levels of experience. Without such development, it is difﬁcult to sort meaning and become conscious of the processes that we are using to make sense of the world. Unless we are able to do so, we are likely to remain trapped in our own unrecognized assumptions, oblivious to the blind spots in our cognitive processes.

Multi-levelled thinking is thus vital to the coach for a number of reasons. First, it helps the coach gauge where the client is in the developmental process and hence where he or she may be stuck and in need of assistance. With multi-levelled thinking, the coach can recognize, for instance, whether the client’s issues concern the relationship between Bateson’s Zero Learning and Level One, or between Levels One and Two, or between Levels Two and Three.

With multi-levelled thinking, the coach can also recognize what level of experience is predominant in the client’s world at any particular moment, and hence whether that level is appropriate for what is being explored. For example, the client may be focused on contextual constraints, while his or her own freedom to choose is ignored. The coach can then redirect the client’s attention to the neglected level.

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Multi-levelled thinking also allows the coach to notice errors in the client’s internal logic or underlying epistemology. This is a prerequisite for the coach being able to inﬂuence the client’s thinking, whether by re-framing it or by updating faulty logic. For example, when the client explains a current impasse as due to previous negative experience, structurally he or she means that the past is determining the future or that what happened once will inevitably happen again. In fact, what happened once long ago is not necessarily going to recur. An effective coach will notice such limitations in thinking and draw them to the client’s attention. As Bateson put it: ‘A sort of freedom comes from recognizing what is necessarily so, and out of that recognition comes the knowledge of how to act.’ A sort of freedom also arises out of recognizing what is not necessarily so, although we had long assumed it was.

Ultimately, development facilitation means assisting the client in recognizing and transcending the limitations implicit in his or her primary underlying assumptions about self and world. We call this process, as we have developed it, ‘Re·Patterning’. Although Re·Patterning involves much more than multi-levelled thinking, the latter is a key part of it. Re·Patterning is a central element in our approach to coaching. At some point in the coaching, we ﬁnd it essential to uncover the underlying roots of the presenting issues in the client’s thinking.

This process can happen on two levels. In many instances, we may simply help the client update limiting thinking within the existing framework of his or her self-concept. For example, in a coaching situation, a long-held belief, such as ‘I have to struggle for what I want’ or ‘I cannot trust anybody’ may emerge as a central element impinging on the client’s ability to move forward. Exploring the contradictions implicit in such beliefs and helping to open the client towards a more appropriate understanding does not necessarily challenge the assumptions as to who and what the client is essentially. As Bateson, pointed out, updating this type of early generalization in the light of more mature experience tends to patch up the ediﬁ ce of Level Two learning, leaving it basically intact.

Sometimes this is all that is called for in the coaching process. At other times, the limiting assumption touches the whole notion of selfhood, as a new level of awareness transcending the old self-boundaries beckons. An effective coach needs to be capable of understanding and accompanying

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such development. This calls for the coach to be comfortable with the full range of multi-levelled thinking.

In developing the full range of multi-levelled thinking, the coach learns how to assist the client in bringing competing outcomes arising from different orders of experience into alignment. The coach can also help him or her negotiate the labyrinth of beliefs and assumptions about what the client can or cannot do, and ultimately as to who or what the client is.

To do so requires the ability to handle different orders of logic at the cognitive level. For instance, statements about our own ability to do something are at a higher logical level than statements about the behaviour itself. Statements about our self are at a higher level still. Within these basic dimensions of behaviour, capability, and identity many nuances are possible. It is vital that the development facilitator be able to track these shifts in register accurately as they are expressions of how the client’s internal world is organized. Tracking the client’s internal logic well is a prerequisite for helping him or her update it, when it is interfering with performance or alignment.

Multi-levelled thinking sorts experience in hierarchies, which we generally represent vertically in our mental space. Typically, we situate abstractions at a ‘higher’ level and the concrete at a ‘lower’ level. This way of sorting experience spatially along a vertical axis appears universal and linked to the physiology of consciousness. It may well have its origins in the natural world and our physical relation with it. We have our feet on the ground in material details, while our head is in the clouds in abstraction. We touch the world with our feet and hands in all its earthy speciﬁcs, while the sky in its relative simplicity is far above our heads. When performance meets alignment, we are in balance, neither lost in detail nor oblivious to it, neither dispersed in abstraction nor neglectful of the big picture. Such vertical alignment is an important key to performance.

Such alignment ultimately involves more than analytic abilities. Multi-levelled thinking inevitably touches orders of experience that transcend conceptual thinking and require a different mode of cognition. That which contains concept, cannot be a concept. To embrace the full range of thinking eventually calls for a kind of awareness that is beyond self-deﬁ nitions, and hence is, in a sense, transpersonal.

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MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES

Almost every aspect of our lives is affected by the presence of others. Attention can never be solely to ourselves. We ﬁnd we also have to consider others, not only from our own point of view, but also from theirs. Just as multi-levelled thinking helps us evaluate and sort potentially conﬂ icting intentions, so the full development of attention presupposes that we are capable of embracing multiple perspectives.

If multi-levelled thinking sorts experience spatially along a vertical axis, with multiple perspectives we sort experience horizontally. Our personal point of view and those of others become focal points within the ﬁ eld of experience. One of the miracles of human experience is that we can displace ourselves within our ﬁeld of attention to take the point of view of others. When we do so, we place ourselves at the centre of their world and can focus on the various levels of their experience – sensory, affective, mental, and even their sense of self.

While we may speak of displacing ourselves to take the point of view of another, more accurately, we shift the grid of experience so that their point of view becomes aligned with where we are. Then, while staying where we are, we are centred in their world perceiving things as they do.

Such perceptual shifts have long been known to writers. The great French novelist Honore de Balzac, for instance, used to seek inspiration for his characters by becoming them – following a beggar in the street, he could feel the beggar’s rags on his own back and know what it was like to be this person.

Literary experiments with the process of telling a story also suggest different perspectives from which events can be narrated. The narrator may be a protagonist sharing his or her perspective or he or she may be someone outside the action, but with a personal slant on what is told. Alternatively, he or she may take a primarily objective stance, reporting events with minimum interpretation.

Shifting our attention from moment to moment to assume different perspectives changes the nature, quality, and meaning of what we experience. As Emerson observed in his essay, Nature:

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position, apprizes us of a dualism.

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We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach and traverse his town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the women, – talking, running, bartering, ﬁ ghting, – the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized at once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial beings.

Such shifting of our perspective can, as Emerson indicates, ‘emancipate us’. By taking multiple perspectives, we gain depth of insight into the varied patterns and relationships present in our life.

In the 1980s John Grinder and Robert Dilts distinguished three primary perspectives or ‘Perceptual Positions’, which they termed Self, Other, and Observer or First, Second, and Third Positions. We sometimes prefer the term, ‘Locus of Attention’, which suggests that in any position or point of view (locus) various focuses are possible. For instance, in the First (or Self) Locus of Attention, we may be focused on various levels of our own experience (such as our context, our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, or sense of self) or we may be focused on the experience of another (what he or she may be thinking, feeling, or perceiving). Similarly, when we adopt the perspective of another in Second Locus, we may be focused on the experience of the other person in regard to themselves or on how they are perceiving us.

People sometimes wonder about the accuracy of the information gleaned from such perceptual shifts. In our experience, what we learn in the Other position is usually very helpful in extending our understanding of what is happening in a relationship. We may need to treat what we learn with some caution, as it can be distorted through our own biases, but it is often astonishingly accurate. It is in any case only part of the information that we use to understand what is happening, along with what we learn from First Locus and the Observer position.

The Observer position corresponds to the third-person linguistic markers

‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’. When we adopt the position of Observer, we do not take the position of anyone in particular (that would be another second locus). We suspend our First Locus self and simply observe what is happening to

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the parties involved in the interaction, including ourselves. This is easier when we adopt a place of knowing outside of the relationship of First and Second Loci, but capable of observing what happens between them with some balance and fairness. This means choosing a point equidistant from both Self and Other. Bias is often reﬂ ected in a closer proximity to one or the other. A genuine Observer position also presupposes that we already have a clear sense of both Self and Other positions.

Besides these three basic positions, three other positions are important in the helping relationship. In 1992, we were invited to teach NLP in Russia to a group of about 175 people drawn from all over the former Soviet Union. These were times of rapid economic, social, and political change. We became curious about what we might learn by assuming positions identifying with whole groups or systems. Rather rashly, we invited participants to take the position of the former Soviet Union. The effect was electrifying, with people becoming very emotional as they felt themselves being torn apart and discarded, a broken dream from the past. A year later in Bali, we continued this exploration and wondered what kind of Locus of Attention we were accessing in identifying with these larger systems

– a collective second position or something else? We concluded that there were in fact two distinct but related positions.

The ﬁrst is an extended Second Position, corresponding to taking the position of multiple Others. This is now sometimes called the System Position. It corresponds to the linguistic referential index ‘you plural’ (‘vous’ or ‘voi’ in French and Italian) just as ordinary second position corresponds to the index ‘you singular’ (‘thou’ in pre-modern English, ‘tu’ in French or Italian).

In the extended Other position, we are not normally part of the system with which we choose to identify. For example, we may be curious about the collective consciousness of a country we are visiting. The extended Other position provides a way of sensing some of the collective attitudes, concerns, and constraints in a group, organization or culture, so that we can anticipate and understand what might be inﬂuencing its behaviour or performance. Because it is a collective position, we experience it as a ‘we’, just as when we really identify with another’s world we assume the ‘I’ of that person. But the ‘we’ is of the group and not something that reﬂ ects our involvement.

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Somewhat different is the position we take when we identify with a system of which we are part. This position we call Fourth Position or Fourth Locus. This is also experienced as a ‘we’. But because we are part of the system this is not an extended Other position, but a ﬁ rst person plural position. We sometimes call this position the ‘We Position’.6

This position can be sensed in real time as a ‘we’, when we are conscious of our participation in a larger whole and speak from that collective perspective. For instance, a member of a couple may use ‘we’ to talk about the couple not as two separate individuals but as a shared identity.

It can be very revealing to apprehend this shared identity within ourselves as if it were a whole person including ourselves. We might wonder: What do I experience when I have our couple inside myself? What do I experience when I become the couple as a whole of which I am part? Again what we encounter is likely to be experienced primarily as feelings and sensations in the body and as images reﬂecting the qualities and tensions in the relationship as a whole.

The last position that we wish to comment upon, Meta Position, owes something to both First and Observer Positions. First Locus is considered a position in which we are fully identiﬁed with our own thinking, feeling, and perceptions, fully associated into the body, although we retain an ability to monitor our own experience. We remain conscious of what we are thinking, seeing, hearing, feeling, or doing. This enables us to ﬁ ne-tune our responses in First Locus. That part of ourselves which is, as it were, looking or listening, over our own shoulder and providing feedback, we can call our ‘meta self’, Meta Position or simply Meta. Meta Position allows us to monitor and evaluate our own First Locus self. The more strongly we identify with this monitoring stance, the more dissociated we become from our First Locus self.

Jung saw two fundamental orientations to experience, ‘perceiving’ and

‘judging’. The former is oriented towards noticing what is there; the latter to evaluating it. Both functions are necessary. Often these functions get divided between the First Locus self and its own Meta Position.7 Both functions need to be in balance for effective performance.

In NLP, the term ‘meta position’ is sometimes used to describe the taking of a detached, objective stance, outside a relationship or system.

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Strictly speaking this is an observer position. Meta Position, as we have deﬁned it, may be considered somewhere between First Position and full Observer Position. The closer we are to our First Locus self, the more our perception is likely to be coloured by our own needs and concerns. This is Meta Position. When our stance is effectively equidistant between Self and Other, we can be most neutral and objective. Then we are closer to the Observer Position.

MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES IN THE HELPING RELATIONSHIP

Each of these positions is vital in development facilitation. An effective development facilitator will practise shifting from one perspective to another. In the process, his communication skills and general acuity develop. In observing a Balinese masked dancer from the village where Peter was living, it was clear that developing the ability to adopt many different personae had led to his being both an accurate observer of others and skilled in recognizing who the particular members of his audience were and how they were responding to the world. He could quickly anticipate and mirror their behaviour and character.

LOCI OF ATTENTION

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We can adopt different Loci of Attention in real time during our interaction with others in order to broaden our understanding of what is happening in our relationship with them. We can also adopt different perceptual positions mentally as a way to review our communication with clients or signiﬁcant others. It can be helpful to put pieces of paper on the ﬂ oor to represent the various participants in the situation we wish to review and move physically from place to place, taking each position in turn. We can take our time to do this as a way of reviewing situations that we do not understand well or feel we need to explore more deeply.

Each of the primary positions has something valuable to offer the coach. In the developmental relationship, for instance, one’s own reactions to the other person are very pertinent. So Self Locus is important, even thought the focus may often be on the other person. The coach needs to be very sensitive to what he or she experiences in interacting with the client. His or her own feelings in response to the client provide valuable feedback as to what is happening in the client’s relationships and way of being in the world. The coach’s own identity is often also an important foil for the client’s. It is important for the client to sense that he or she is interacting with a real person with solid qualities.

Through Second Locus the development facilitator can appreciate what things mean and how they are perceived in the client’s internal world. Stepping into the client’s shoes periodically provides insight and understanding. Second Locus is the key to empathy, which helps build trust and openness.

The Observer Position enables the development facilitator to ‘take a step back’ and evaluate more objectively what is happening in his or her interaction with the client. The Observer position can help the development facilitator recognize important patterns and loops in their communication. Often in challenging communication we are inclined to believe that A causes B – e.g., aggressiveness from one side ‘causes’ defensiveness on the other. Assuming First and Second Locus and then taking the Observer stance can help us perceive a deeper dynamic in which the causality is not linear but circular – where defensiveness from one side also contributes to aggressiveness from the other. Recognizing such loops is essential for resolving limiting patterns of communication. A linear approach may fail to address the way in which difﬁculties are not so much rooted in a particular person, as in the patterns of their interaction.

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The Fourth or We Position is also very important for the helping relationship. The quality of the relational ﬁeld shared with the client provides valuable feedback for the development facilitator. In apprehending a sense of the undercurrents in the relationship as a whole, valuable insight may be gained relevant to the issues being explored. It may also suggest areas that need to be explored but are being neglected. Fourth position helps us recognize what is happening in the relational ﬁeld, not as intellectual theory but as lived experience. This is sometimes quite difﬁ cult to apprehend, as the ‘we’ is a joint identity of at least two selves. The conscious mind cannot apprehend such complexity in detail, as it is itself a part of the system it is attempting to comprehend. Feeling and symbolic images, however, convey a global sense of what cannot easily be articulated in words. This global sense provides pointers to deeper understanding.

An effective development facilitator will be sensitive to the biases in the client’s way of adopting different Loci of Attention. Perceptual positions are important in combination with multi-levelled thinking. It is important for the coach to recognize which levels of experience the client over or under emphasizes in a particular position. The coach can then direct attention to neglected portions of experience within a particular Locus. A simple example is where the client emphasizes mental experience in Self Locus, but affective levels are neglected. Conversely, where the affective is being overemphasized, it may be important to explore what is happening on a more cognitive level.

Sometimes, the client’s difﬁculties arise from mixing two positions. For instance, Self and Other positions may not be adequately distinguished, so that what is taken for empathy contains a strong element of projection. Sometimes the development facilitator’s main task is to help the client develop a true First or Second Locus or to develop a genuine Observer stance that is less of a self-oriented Meta Position.

In the helping relationship, the coach may assist the client in taking a neglected perspective in order to expand understanding of a particular problematic situation, whether in the interaction with the coach or in his account of another relationship.

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POTENTIAL IMPACT OF EXCESS OR LACK OF PERCEPTUAL POSITION

EXCESS OF

LACK OF

FIRST POSITION

Dominant; overassertive; insensitive; selﬁsh.

Difﬁculty in pursuing own goals and in asserting own needs.

SECOND POSITION

Too empathic; may neglect own needs or truth.

Lack of empathy; failure to understand or anticipate others’ needs.

THIRD POSITION

Distant; over-rational, not engaged emotionally; uncommitted.

Cannot evaluate accurately what happens with others.

FOURTH POSITION

Loses own identity in the group. Excessively sensitive to emotional undercurrents in the ﬁeld.

Insensitive to developments in the group ﬁeld. Unable to think in a systemic way.

Sometimes, what is required is to help the client develop a neglected position, not just in order to understand a particular situation but to bring more balance to daily life. Excess of a particular Locus and neglect of other positions is often pertinent to the challenges facing the client. Typically, we favour one or two Loci of Attention and neglect others. This may prove a serious limitation in everyday life. Neglect of Second Locus, may mean that the client has difﬁculty in empathizing with others. Too much attention to Second Locus may mean the client has a great ability to understand others, but is less able to take a ﬁrm stance and take care of his or her own needs. Excessive Third Locus can mean the client observes well, but is distant and prefers to watch from the sidelines. Conversely, lack of Third Locus can make for a warm person, but one who has difﬁculty in taking a step back to evaluate the situations in which he or she is involved.

WITNESSING AWARENESS

We may switch from one Locus of Attention to another consciously or unconsciously. But whichever point of view we experience, we do so within the ﬁeld of our awareness. Awareness provides a common backdrop to every perceptual position, although we are rarely aware of awareness

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itself. Normally, our focus on the contents of experience obscures awareness of consciousness itself.

When awareness itself is experienced in its pure state, it is apprehended as a silent, impassive, non-changing reﬂector of experience. Hints of it can be had at many transition points in everyday life – for instance, when slipping off to sleep, or in the period when we emerge from sleep and are not yet fully awake. It may also be sensed between two moments of perception, or between two thoughts – ‘half-heard, like the stillness between two waves of the sea’, as Eliot put it.

In many traditions people call this ground of awareness ‘the Witness’ or witnessing consciousness. People describe experience of this being-consciousness as if they recognize that beneath all mental activity, present across all contents and contexts, there is a kind of ‘silent witness’ to, or mirror-like reﬂector of, all that falls in it. Paul Valery, the French poet-philosopher who daily probed the roots of his own internal functioning, compared this element of experience to a particular note in music, which once heard persists through all the vicissitudes of a symphony. He calls this, ‘my Pure Self, by which I mean the absolute of consciousness’. The Pure Self is like ‘that precious Zero of mathematical notation, to which every algebraic expression is equal.’ This awareness, he says, ‘separates itself automatically from everything, including our very personality, with its history, peculiarities, various capabilities and preferences.’8 It is implicit in and permits all our perceptual positions.

This witnessing awareness cannot be contrived. We can only apprehend it by being it. This being-consciousness is transpersonal and universal. It is the frame in which all selves and identities occur; it is the ambient medium of our ordinary waking selves in all their permutations, as water is to ﬁsh (Fig. c). Witnessing awareness is implicit in all loci of attention. Truly switching our locus of attention, we suggest, implies returning albeit brieﬂy to this effectively transpersonal level of experience, then entering the new set of possibilities (Fig. b), rather than leaping across to some closed foreign world (Fig. a). If we are able to return, momentarily, to this silent witnessing awareness, our switch of locus of attention will be more accurate and complete. As the closest position, qualitatively, to witnessing awareness, third position is often used in this way, to provide a neutral transition.

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-PN__H -PN__I -PN__J

The incredibly accurate knowledge of others’ experience, which so many people access in deep trance identiﬁcation, suggests that our own awareness is not restricted to the possibilities of one nervous system, but that we can actually tap into any. We suggest this is so, because human experience participates in a common ground, which is content-free, but has the possibility of any experience (i.e. any identity). Our personal patterns resonate in the patternless pattern that connects.

One can imagine a process of development in which we initially attempt to bridge differences between ourselves and others (Fig. a). We remain primarily centred in a particular locus, and in switching from one to another, shift among particular worlds or world-views. In time, we sometimes become aware of a common ground transcending the different loci (Fig. b). But for quite a while we may remain primarily identiﬁ ed with one particular locus of attention or another. Eventually, we ﬁ nd ourselves identifying more and more with the mirror of experience, in which the various loci are reﬂected, as witnessing awareness comes to predominate (Fig. c). Practice in shifting Locus of Attention supports such development. In recognizing more and more that any Locus of Attention is just one possible node of knowing among many, we become less and less attached to any particular identiﬁcation and increasingly open to the ﬁ eld in which these various modes of knowing become possible.

Familiarity with witnessing awareness adds a valuable dimension to the helping relationship. Resting in that which is beyond the personal self provides the coach with a very calm, clear state of awareness that can reﬂect the whole range of the client’s experience. In this clear state of awareness, insight into what is true and important naturally emerges. The various perceptual positions and what they bring are easily available.

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Occasionally, the coach needs familiarity with Witnessing Awareness in order to understand what is happening in the client. Sometimes the client may be encountering Witnessing Awareness and is unsure about what this means. He or she may feel detached and may wonder if this is normal and whether he or she is losing the appetite for life. In such cases, it is important that the coach understands what is happening and distinguish it from unhealthy dissociated states. Then he or she can support development in the client.

QUESTIONING

In the dynamics that lead from simple change to learning, the ability to ask questions is vital. Development in the ability to ask questions goes hand in hand with the ability to handle different perspectives and levels of thinking. On the one hand, questions set the direction for multi-levelled thinking and the exploration of different perspectives. On the other, what we encounter as we assume different perspectives and shift levels in our thinking can also stimulate important questions.

However, multi-levelled thinking and multiple perspectives are a prerequisite for appropriate questioning, rather than the reverse. Our ability to think in terms of different levels and points of view enable us to ask more precise and useful questions. When children ﬁrst discover the power of questions, their questions are often characterized by quantity and repetition, rather than quality. That is not to say that children do not ask some very good questions in their innocence. But with the development of the ability to handle different levels of thinking, their questioning ability becomes surer.

People can understand fairly quickly that different questions have different effects. Simple distinctions between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ questions, for instance, have long featured in basic sales training programmes, even though in reality a closed question frequently does not lead to a ‘yes’ or

‘no’ answer. Knowing how to ask different types of question is relatively straightforward. More challenging is the ability to know which question to ask at which moment. This ability presupposes that we can ask questions about our questions.

Being able to think on different levels and take different perspectives allows us to ask more precise questions. Questions presuppose a dynamic

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relationship between what we know and what we do not know. The less we know, the more we are likely to be vague as to what we do not know. We cannot ask questions without making distinctions. The more distinctions we can make, the more precise the questions we can ask. Asking precise questions presupposes that we already have a lot of knowledge. That is why a master of something can ask such beautiful questions.

Questions are a way of orienting the attention, to invite a passage from not-knowing to knowing. When we can deﬁne what we do not know or would like to know with some precision, we initiate a process in which the mind is open to discover what it did not know. This happens in a very mundane way whenever we open a book with a clear question of what we would like to discover from it. Generally, we ﬁnd that we locate the information quickly and effortlessly. Knowing what we do not know and wish to clarify is a cornerstone of the art of questioning, although it should not preclude a more open general curiosity about the client.

In the helping relationship, the questions we ask are doubly important. First, good questions help the development facilitator move from ignorance to understanding in relation to the client’s internal world. As coaches, the questions we ask ourselves help us know how to assist the client. Second, the coach’s questions stimulate learning in the client. Often in a coaching session, we may ask a question and the client becomes silent, then saying ‘That’s a very good question’. Such a response is an indicator that our question is taking the client into important but uncharted territory. Important questions become a way to expand the thinking of the client, leading him or her to new insights and possibilities.

As such, as development facilitators, we sometimes ask questions to which we may already have good answers, so that the client can have an opportunity to think things through to a conclusion by him- or herself.

Asking questions, then, can set a direction for learning and discovery. Certain questions can help us assume a state of readiness for learning. For instance, asking ‘What is there to discover here?’ sets the attention towards discovery. Conversely, entering a state in which we are keyed to learn, tends to provide us with a lot of questions. This is one of the values of methods such as brainstorming, in which shared creative innocence can lead to interesting questions and possible answers.

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Some questions have a creative function in themselves, inviting us to conceive of things we had not thought of before. Questions of the ‘what if?’ type allow us to imagine possibilities without necessarily testing them in reality. This can help reﬁne choice and prepare the way for taking fresh steps that might otherwise never be considered. It is the gift of the coach to lead the client towards such questions.

EXPANDING BOUNDARIES

Learning expands personal boundaries. Through learning, our ability to handle experience in the world grows. Knowledge and experience enable us to manage increasingly complex and challenging situations in daily life. In principle, the more we know, understand, and master, the more conﬁ dent and competent we become. As we learn, we overcome personal limitations and expand our territory of inﬂuence. This expansion of personal boundaries is twofold. In the ﬁrst instance, it is cognitive. Knowledge and understanding opens our minds to broader horizons. When we talk of ignorance, we talk of darkness, of a closed mind. Education, we believe, opens the mind and removes darkness. We talk of ‘higher’ or ‘further’ education. To learn is to expand the container of knowledge and this can be experienced as an increase in our mental space. This expanded mental space is often a prelude to actualizing hitherto unrealized possibilities.

Multi-levelled thinking, multiple perspectives, and questioning are prerequisites for higher learning, but they do not guarantee that that learning necessarily leads to expanding boundaries. Our ﬁrst steps in a new ﬁeld may discourage, as we become more aware of how much we do not know. In Chapter Two, we suggested that learning serves to extend our ability to maintain coherency in the face of change. We naturally have quite a strong instinct for self-preservation. And while fear can sometimes motivate us to take unusual steps in order to protect ourselves, it can also be very effective in holding the boundaries of self in place by paralysing action. This can be very restrictive of learning. There is thus an important second level of boundary expansion that comes with action in the world.

Expansion of boundaries through action is an important part of the learning process, whether it provides a step on the way to new possibilities

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of understanding and accomplishment or marks a ﬁnal stage in bringing theory to life.

For instance, the authors recall how learning another language in school brought some expansion of knowledge. But ﬁrst meeting a native speaker of that language was a shocking experience. It brought home the difference between the isolated parts learnt from a grammar book and the seamless stream of sound that came out of a person’s mouth. The act of discerning in that sound some words learnt in school and being able to respond to them falteringly was a major step. It made the possibility of communicating through that language real and exciting. It opened the possibility of not only communicating across an abyss of difference with another person, but the possibility of communicating with anybody anywhere, whether through that language or others.

Sometimes, this active expansion of boundaries comes, as in this instance, a good way into the learning process. Sometimes, it occurs early on. For instance, the vogue for ﬁre-walking was very much fuelled by the way it gave people a reference experience for overcoming personal boundaries and discovering that they could be and do more than they thought. In itself, the ability to walk across a few metres of red-hot coals is not an essential life-skill in our culture. But the courage to face limiting personal doubts and fears and overcome them is invaluable. Awakening the ability to go beyond boundaries in this way can open the door to valuable learning.

An important part of coaching consists in leading the client to steps that will expand boundaries through the facing and handling of new challenges. People come to coaching because they are stuck. Sometimes they may be stuck because they do not know what to do to move forward. Sometimes they may have an idea of what they should do, but are unable to begin.

The coach may have an important role in expanding boundaries in the client’s thinking, but this is a ﬁrst step. There is a world of difference between dissociated and associated learning. When there is understanding without action, learning remains theoretical. Theoretical learning does not necessarily involve any increase in either alignment or performance. The coach thus not only helps the client to expand cognitive boundaries, but also encourages, cajoles, or insists upon actions that will lead him or her to overcome fear and ‘go for it’. Sometimes at a swimming pool, one

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can see someone on the diving board, hesitating as to whether to jump or not. He or she may see others jumping safely into the water, but be unable to follow suit. Helping the client to take the plunge (with support and respect for safety) is a way of facilitating the expansion of boundaries. It is only by taking the plunge that we discover what we are capable of and actualize our potential. Facing fear permits choice. Choice gives us the freedom to assume greater personal alignment and surpass past performance.

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FIVE

THE FURTHER REACHES OF LEARNING

Man is all symmetry,

Full of proportions, one limb to another,

And all to all the world besides.

Each part may call the farthest, brother;

For head with foot have private amity,

And both with moons and tides.

GEORGE HERBERT

PATTERN

As the four abilities outlined in the previous chapter become integrated, they operate at a higher level, allowing the full development of learning. With the expansion of personal boundaries and the development of the ability to think on different levels, assume different viewpoints, and ask good questions, the ability to perceive and manage multiple levels of patterning also grows.

This is vital for both coach and client. For the client, full development of learning prepares the way for personal mastery. For the coach, it is a precondition for embracing the full complexity of the client.

In the opening chapter, we deﬁned a pattern as a set of relationships of similarity and difference that recurs. Pattern, we suggested, exists in an intermediary zone between the world as it is and our minds evaluating, interpreting, and sorting, as we reach for understanding and accommodation to that world.

Pattern thus presupposes ‘punctuation’ a marking out of the boundaries of what we are considering. It is rather like determining where the river begins and ends. Is it just the water ﬂowing in it? Or does it include the bed, and banks, the ocean, the source? When we punctuate, we determine the boundaries of a pattern or system. Conversely, the boundaries we set through our punctuation also determine the patterns that we perceive within those boundaries.

In perceiving pattern, we pass from content to a more abstract level, in which details point to a commonality. Identifying a pattern brings us towards a new level of understanding of the detail we had been considering.

Since a pattern is a conﬁguration that repeats, multiple examples of a phenomenon are generally necessary to be sure that we have observed a pattern. This is a useful caveat, but since there is nothing that is not already part of a pattern, one example can be enough. A fragment of a holographic image contains information concerning the whole, enabling us to recover under coherent light, a representation of the complete image. When we are dealing with people, small fragments of experience are highly revealing of the whole. Every move and gesture can be familiar because typically human, and yet as unique as a ﬁ ngerprint. Repetition offers valuable conﬁ rmation, but is not absolutely essential.

Sometimes a single expression can be particularly revealing about a person. For instance, a sculptress who was being coached by Jan commented, at one point, ‘Ik moet het zelf kunnen opheffen’. It was as if in this one phrase she summed up the whole drama of her life and work. The Dutch has a telling ambiguity. It means ‘I have to be able to pick it up by myself’ (both literally and ﬁ guratively) and also ‘I have to be able to transcend myself’. In her world, she was continually striving both for independence – hence the importance of making her sculptures small enough to pick up – and to go beyond herself. The two notes of this one phrase seemed to resonate in almost every aspect of her life, producing

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both coherence and confusion, as she leaned now towards self-sufﬁ ciency, now towards self-transcendence, now enjoying the beneﬁts of this double focus, now struggling as she mixed up the two strands of meaning. She easily confused going it alone with going beyond herself or surpassing herself in stubborn isolation.

It is vital that the development facilitator notice such telling patterns. Pattern is a way of managing complexity. The organizing principles inherent in natural patterns are fewer than the variety of patterns themselves. The blades of grass in a meadow may each be subtly different in their shape, size, or angle of bend, but their form and pattern of organization repeats. Often in nature, this repetition appears in analogous structures reﬂ ected on different levels of organization. Mandelbrot’s computer-generated fractals replicate the way in which a pattern can recur both in the parts and in the whole, much as we see in nature, where the patterns of roots, branches, and leaves may mirror each other. In human beings, too, patterns repeat in analogous ways on different levels of behaviour and experience. The need for independence can manifest on the level of how one manages the sculptures in one’s studio and in the striving to surpass oneself. A single phrase or gesture can reﬂect a pattern that connects many aspects of the person.

This is important for both coach and client. The coach needs skills to track and understand the implications of the client’s patterns as they become manifest. Meanwhile, in the helping relationship, the client comes to new realizations about the nature of his or her existing patterns. Such realization can lead to the modiﬁcation of existing patterns and the acquisition of new ones. The coach may actively foster this process or simply help prepare the ground for a new level of understanding to emerge.

PATTERNING

Through pattern we give meaning to, and make sense of, the world. Through pattern we discover a richer meaning within our experience. Our handling of pattern has its own patterns. The term ‘patterning’ points to the way pattern both results from a process of cognition and is implicit in the process itself. Patterning connects feeling, thinking, and knowing in a vital synthesis. Patterning permits a healthy relationship between the

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impoverishing simpliﬁcation of over-generalization and the impossible abundance of unlimited detail.

Patterning is the key to ﬂexible living. Mastery of patterning liberates, because it takes us out of the morass of content and into the rareﬁ ed realms of the emerging structures and contexts of content. As a result, we travel more lightly.

Our minds are predisposed to ﬁnding pertinent connections in our experience. Sometimes, it is as if the patterns are simply there, waiting for us to stumble upon them. Such patterns have the force of objective truths. At other times, it is as if the patterns we ﬁ nd are coloured by our own patterning, reﬂections more of our maps and our map-making than of the territory itself. Patterning becomes an exquisite art when our creation of patterns reﬂ ects the pattern of creation itself.

Patterning brings beauty into our lives. Beauty lies in our appreciative apprehension of the relationships of similarity and difference in our ﬁ eld of experience. Discovery and response to pattern is central to aesthetic appreciation, whether formally in relation to the arts, or informally in relation to the patterns of life itself. In sensitivity to pattern and patterning, we ﬁ nd the key to the art of living.

Potentially, our patterning is generative, capable of renewing and revising itself in the light of fresh experience and understanding. However, in many people, the patterns have become sclerotic and stuck. Most people live within the constraints of frozen patterns that they or others have imposed on experience. The key question then is: How can I free myself up so that the patterns of my life become truly generative? Or: How can I sense the generative pattern unfolding in my life as a whole, and align myself with it? Such questions inform the spirit of Re·Patterning as we practise it in our coaching.

With increasing sensitivity to pattern, we recognize the nature of the cocoon we have spun about ourselves. Growing mastery in patterning, allows the butterﬂy of spirit to emerge from the rigid structures of received responses, to dry its wings in the clear breeze of awareness, and ﬂ y freely into the light.

This entails coming into harmony, not only with our individual pattern, but with the larger pattern of life. For we are both part of the larger pattern and that in which the larger pattern occurs. To be out of alignment with the larger pattern is to be out of alignment with ourselves. This

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holds true for both coach and client. Working with the client’s patterning presupposes that we actively seek greater alignment in our own.

Patterning is implicit in all work of genius, but there is little formal education in it. Mastery in most disciplines, from engineering to applied linguistics, inevitably implies the development of ﬁne skills of patterning, and development facilitation is no exception. But patterning skills are normally tied to the content of that particular discipline. The patterning, which shapes the perceiving of pattern, and transcends and connects any discipline to any other sphere of knowledge, is normally neglected.

Much of the foundation for patterning is laid down in a child’s early years. The hours a child spends playing with coloured blocks and puzzles of various kinds, discovering what ﬁts with what, trains the mind and senses to recognize patterns of sameness and difference. This sets the basis for higher order identiﬁcation and manipulation of pattern, as educators such as Georg Feuerstein have clearly recognized. On all levels the child is primarily involved in identifying and absorbing patterns, in how the physical world functions, in language, and in family, social, and cultural relationships.

In effect, the child slowly builds up the capacity to identify relationships of similarity and difference using his or her senses. The perception and manipulation of patterns of shape, colour, and sound lay the foundation for more complex abstract generalizations. The capacity to distinguish sensory patterns underpins our higher intellectual activity. The quality of our subsequent patterning appears to rest on our capacity, not only to generalize, but to be sensitive to news of difference. If pattern recognition involves going from particulars to the general, from details to their meaning, the capacity to notice difference is primary.

For example, modern medicine was revolutionized by the realization that a mould attacking laboratory cultures could be used as an antibacterial agent. This realization depended upon ﬁrst noticing that there was a mould and what else it might mean other than contamination of laboratory samples. Sensory perception alone is not enough to make the higher order generalization, but it is an essential starting point. Cultivating greater awareness of sensory distinctions plays an important part in developing patterning.

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Patterning can be deﬁned as giving words to what one senses. Patterning

often involves deﬁ ning inarticulate feelings and intuitions at the edge of

consciousness. The feeling that there is something we want to understand

better often stimulates a probing for hidden connections. Patterning can

thus be either a mainly mental or feeling process. When the mind is

more involved, we tend towards the active discrimination of intellectual

structures. When we rely more on the heart, we become receptive to

imaginative and aesthetic insight.

Patterning involves discovering a relationship among elements of expe

rience. As such it requires the ability to recognize sameness, the ability to notice things that ‘ﬁt’ together. It also involves the ability to notice differences, things that are odd, quirky, lacking harmony – as Hopkins puts it, ‘All things counter, original, spare, strange’. The sense of incongruity and difference lets us know that something does not ﬁt. We often recognize incongruity through sensations in the body alerting us that something is amiss. This suggests that the whole of us is involved in sensing congruity and incongruity. We are ultimately ﬁnely attuned to pattern and shifts

and imbalances in it.

Patterning involves recognizing connections that are not necessarily

obvious. Since everything in nature is linked through similarity and dif

ference with everything else, we are not only noticing patterns already

present in the world, but also inventing relationships and connections

that may surprise both ourselves and others when shared. Patterning is

an important part of the appeal of art, both in its creation and in its en

joyment.

Patterning exists not only in the internal world of coach or client, but in the relationship between them. The patterns of coach and client are in a constant dance, in which the inﬂuence is reciprocal, dynamic, and systemic. For the coach this means being aware of multiple orders of patterning

– his or her own, the client’s, and the patterns occurring in their interaction. The patterns that develop in the relationship between coach and client invariably reﬂect the issues confronting the client. For instance, if the client is talking about being too dependent on the opinion of others, whether or not the coach expresses agreement, he or she is caught up in the pattern. Managing the patterns manifesting themselves in the helping relationship is often the key to change, learning, and growth in the client.

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CONTEXTUALIZING

The skill of patterning thus develops in close relation to another important facet of higher learning, the ability to contextualize. A pattern can only be distinguished when there is a context against which it can emerge. Contextualizing involves distinguishing the foreground and background of a pattern, which brings it into relief. Deﬁning a pattern presupposes noticing a contrast with contexts or structures in which the pattern is absent. That which presents itself to our attention is always in structural relation to that which does not, but which contrasts with it.

Sameness is brought into relief by difference, and difference reveals itself against a background of sameness – like the black sheep in a ﬂ ock of white sheep. Everything presupposes that which it is unlike – a point made by Claude Levi-Strauss and the structuralists with their notion of binary opposites. Cold presupposes a distinction in relation to heat, and vice-versa; the raw contrasts with the cooked; that which is considered edible is set against the inedible. Binary oppositions provide a way of exploring and contextualizing patterns. Khalil Gibran makes the same kind of point rather more poetically:

Some of you say, ‘Joy is greater than sorrow,’

and others say, ‘Nay, sorrow is the greater.’

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board,

remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.

Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.9

Interestingly, Gibran alludes to a place of emptiness outside the tension between opposites. Pattern presupposes sameness and difference. But both sameness and difference are ultimately facets of content. Content includes both, but contrasts with that which is content-free. Pattern perception takes place against a background of emptiness, which it obscures, but which ultimately makes it possible. Our own awareness provides the ultimate context for our patterning.

As we study the patterns to pattern, we eventually approach a pattern

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implicit and inherent in all pattern. As Bateson put it: ‘The pattern which connects is a metapattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that metapattern which deﬁnes the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect.’

And that pattern eventually points back to emptiness. Bateson continues: ‘Mind is empty; it is no-thing. It exists only in its ideas, and these again are no-things. Only the ideas are immanent, embodied in their examples. And the examples are again, no-things. The claw, as an example, is not the Ding an sich... Rather it is what mind makes of it, namely, an example of something or other’.10

The post-structuralist, Jacques Derrida also pointed to the all-pervasive immanence of patterns. Derrida softened the binary patterning of structuralism by locating meaning not only in simple oppositions, but in a network of meaning. Meaning arises with difference, but one difference ‘defers’ to other differences. Meaning is not only locked into pairs of opposites, but to a whole web of meaning, in which each part means something because it is in relationship with other parts, which in turn imply it and other parts, ad inﬁ nitum. ‘Deconstruction’ involves attempting to peel away the layers of interconnected meanings to approach a deeper pattern.

Contextualizing means recognizing how what one is learning relates to what one already knows. Enriching connections with our existing cognitive maps accelerates understanding and integration. When we contextualize our learning we also know when and where it can be applied. This helps make our knowledge practical and useful in our lives.

In the helping relationship, contextualizing involves recognizing when and where the client’s patterns typically are manifest and similarly where they are absent. It may be that certain patterns are appropriate in a particular context, but inappropriate in others. Task-orientation, for instance, may be invaluable in the context of getting a job done, but inappropriate in handling the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Conversely, some patterns may be valuable in a person’s life in some contexts, but absent from other contexts where they are needed. Part of the coach’s challenge is to ﬁnd ways to help the client connect patterns to contexts where they will be useful and to separate them from contexts where they are unhelpful.

On another level, contextualizing means recognizing how the client’s patterns are interconnected in ways that affect many contexts. Exploring

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pattern in relation to the contexts where they do and do not appear brings one to deeper levels of patterning. For instance, the story of how the client feels conﬁdent in some contexts, but lacks conﬁdence in others, points, on a deeper level, to how the client handles the issue of safety in his or her life. These deeper levels are more inﬂuential because they impact many contexts in the client’s life. The deepest threads of patterning can impact the client throughout his or her life as a whole.

Even relatively simple issues in the client are connected to these deeper strands. An important part of development facilitation involves at some point ﬁnding and realigning the underlying deep patterning behind the surface issues. This process is at the heart of Re·Patterning.

WONDERING

Identifying and realigning deep patterning is a sensitive process, one which demands a particular quality to our questioning. Asking questions, such as ‘What is the important pattern here?’ or ‘How do these two facets of this person ﬁt together?’ can stimulate the recognition of patterns. But at a higher level, we need a particular kind of relationship with our questions if we are to have deeper insight into the issues we and our clients face in everyday life. An attitude of innocent curiosity can transform the quality of our questions and our response to them. Both development facilitator and client can beneﬁt from welcoming questions, without grasping for answers, as Rilke encourages in his Letters to a Young Poet:

Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves . . . Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Learning about what is happening in our lives beneﬁts greatly from curiosity and wanting to know, combined with a readiness to ‘not know’. When we enjoy a ﬁ ne balance between wondering about what is already present in our awareness, together with an openness to discover what might potentially be there, our learning can be most profound and creative.

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In being sensitive to what we do not know, the answers to our questions can emerge.

The recognition of important but elusive patterns typically happens when we shift between knowing and not-knowing. Sometimes, we may pass back and forth from question to potential answer. Or, better still, we may simply rest in a state of wondering, enjoying both knowing and not-knowing at the same time, until insight emerges.

Paul Valery aptly evoked this active receptivity when he compared the poet in the act of creation to a spider alert in the centre of its uncreated web, ready to capture the emerging prey. In studying the patterns of trading experts, Charles Faulkner encountered a futures trader who demonstrated a similar alert receptivity to shifts in pattern. Often, the trader would simply relax with unfocused awareness before the board displaying current options, with eyes half closed, just being there, until something alerted him to an important shift.

Some of the new thinking in the life sciences and chaos theory suggests that living systems are structured with the possibility of new levels of order emerging from the edge of chaos. In a similar way, our minds seem designed for new patterns of order and meaning to emerge spontaneously from the apparent chaos of that which we ﬁnd confusing or contradictory.

One of the problems with things like graphology and palmistry is that they encourage simplistic knowing rather than wondering. By relying on

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pre-existing schemata, they encourage questions such as ‘How does our knowledge of these lines enable us to construct a representation of this person?’ rather than a more thoughtful wondering about how the hand is a unique expression of the person or the person a natural extension of their hand.

Wondering, then, helps us be both lightly focused and unfocused at the same time. An analogy of what we have in mind is provided by the constellation of dots on page 108. Embedded in the dots is an image that only emerges with a certain kind of looking, in which you focus on the page, while allowing your focusing to be unfocused. Then the image, as it were, reveals itself to you. When it does so, it emerges with something of the force of surprise from the puzzling background. Further inspection will reveal, to those interested, how the patterns of sameness, with some differences, allow the eyes to discover the form hidden within the arrangement of dots.

We ﬁnd this an apt metaphor for the role of wondering in patterning and learning. Patterning involves simple observation and analysis, but at higher levels it also requires sensitivity to imagination, intuition, metaphor, and hunches, in which we enjoy moments of profound discovery.

Higher learning requires a combination of humbleness and trust in our own experience. We need to be deeply self-referenced, yet surrendered to unforeseen possibilities. With humility, we can surrender our habits of knowing and allow ourselves to be open to that emptiness in which we become available to what may be outside our attention. In trusting inner experience, we come to trust our intuitions as to what we do and do not know. This enables us to recognize and trust the bodily cues that let us know, like a dissonant note in a music performance, that there is something which does not ﬁt. We follow our intuitions, at the edge of the beam of attention, until a more encompassing level of understanding emerges.

OWNING

With the full development of the learning process, what we have been learning becomes a part of us. What we have been exploring not only expands our horizons, it becomes ours. This owning of what we have been learning is a prerequisite for mastery.

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Before we have learnt, we do not know. Once we have learnt, we certainly know. In between, a mysterious process bridges not knowing and knowing. This process may not be particularly available to our conscious minds, but it is essential for what we are learning to become ours. In our seminars, we have explored with our students what happens within them when a breakthrough insight occurs or an important new level of integration happens. Almost invariably, people describe a moment in which the elements they had been exploring gel into a gestalt, which at the same time becomes part of, or connected to, their body. With the new constellation comes the realization that what till then was alien is not only familiar and accessible, but part of oneself. We call this process

‘crystallization’, although it is not a static process. The new gestalt may

bring the confused and moving elements of experience to a new, stable

pattern. Or stuck elements of our internal world may ﬂow in a new mov

ing constellation.

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When crystallization brings a number of complex patterns to a new level of uniﬁed understanding, we use the term ‘model’ to refer to this new level of patterning. A model simpliﬁes the overarching complexity of multi-ordinate patterns to make them intelligible and manageable. Through our models, we synthesize the patterns present in self, others, and the world so that they can become fully accessible to us. Our models help us connect intention and action in the world. If patterning helps us tune into the very core, essence, or life of something, crystallizing the model brings that something to life in us.

If we are learning how to make a cake, we may observe how a friend goes about it. At ﬁrst we are simply perceiving and interpreting what our friend does. Little by little, we recognize and note patterns. Eventually, we not only recognize the steps, but synthesize them, coding their structure, visually (as pictures) or aurally, as we talk ourselves through the procedure, or kinaesthetically as we feel ourselves (or imagine feeling what our friend would feel) going through the steps. We call this internal coding of the process a model. We ‘own’ the process of cake making, when the model crystallizes and becomes ours.

Whereas patterns have an indeterminate existence, partly in us and partly out there in the world, models are more fully constructs of our internal world. We notice patterns, but create a model. A pattern may reﬂect our punctuation of perception, but it remains more closely connected to something ‘out there’. A model is effectively an explanation of our experience, a construct of our constructs. This does not mean that we assemble a model like a plastic toy. The elements of a model generally come together within our not-knowing in a way that engenders a lot of wonder and awe.

So, whereas patterning involves noticing that there is indeed a pattern, the pattern becomes a model when we conclude ‘this pattern means…’ or when our coding of a complex pattern, or a complex of patterns, helps us understand or handle those patterns in their appropriate context. A coherent model is a gift of the imagination to help manage complexity. Ideally, though not inevitably, the latter remains implicit in the model, even if immediate details are streamlined.

Our models shape our cognitive maps and beliefs about ‘reality’. We then use these maps to manage our experience. In everyday life, we usually apply existing models, rather than create fresh ones. We interpret the

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pattern of habitual and even unusual events in the light of our current maps and models, matching our experience to these maps. Ideally, where there is a mismatch, we will seek to extend or replace our model.

Unfortunately, we often suppress incongruities in order to protect our existing models. At ﬁrst as children, our maps and models are relatively malleable, but as time goes on, the substrate of assumptions and presuppositions we have gathered in life may make it increasingly difﬁ cult to adjust freshly to new experience. From offering a lens through which we may perceive more clearly, our models can begin to blind and bind us. Just as the prescription for lenses, which we might use to enhance our ability to see, needs correcting from time to time, so do the models that facilitate our experience of the world.

It is the task of the development facilitator to unearth these discrepancies and incoherencies, so that the client can update old maps and models. As these become fully integrated, the client comes to own the new way of thinking. Fresh pathways to action become possible.

Sometimes, as a ﬁ rst step, it is necessary to bring the client to ownership of his or her starting situation. This is not always easy, as we often ﬁnd it more comfortable to turn away from home truths. The coach needs to be quite ﬁrm in bringing the client to face initial difﬁculties and, not inappropriately, we term this phase of the coaching process ‘nose in the shit.’ This phase, however, is vital. Unless the client fully acknowledges the manifestations of the problem as his or her own, he or she will be unable to commit fully to resolving the problems he or she faces. Owning the symptoms is a precondition for working with the problem and hence for owning the solutions.

Full ownership presupposes action in the world. Action makes owning complete. Sometimes, action is the primary key to ownership. Repetition helps make things part of ourselves. When people learn things that involve a tool or instrument, constant practice makes the instrument an extension of themselves. It becomes part of them. The self expands to include things that were external before.

As coaches, it is important to ensure that insight leads to action. The mysterious process of crystallization eases the pathway to action, in that it is so much easier to express what is already ours. But it is only a ﬁ rst step. The insights and understanding the client acquires only blossom and

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bear fruit when manifest in the world. Applying what we have realized provides an opportunity for the testing, feedback, revision, and deeper levels of integration in the body that make it truly ours.

We can think of learning as a process that enables us to manage the complexity of life. In wondering, patterning, and contextualizing, we embrace complexity until the crystallization of new insights allows us to simplify and own what we have been exploring. During this process, testing and applying help prepare that ownership by offering feedback and fresh insight through what we do. And as a ﬁnal step, testing and applying ensure and conﬁrm that what we have been learning is ﬁ nally and irrevocably ours.

As development facilitators, we are engaged in supporting the different facets and phases of learning in the client. We help create the conditions for wondering that will allow the client to explore pattern and contextualize appropriately. We hold the space for a new crystallization of understanding, the gateway to ownership, to emerge. And we support the testing and extension of that ownership by encouraging action in the world.

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The processes of patterning, contextualizing, wondering, and owning imply each other. They overlap and invoke each other. When they work closely together, something very powerful emerges, which embraces each of them, but offers something more than any of them on their own. In their interplay, we deepen our connection both to ourselves and to the world around us. We enjoy a kind of accelerated learning that touches every level of our life and our relationships, knitting the fabric of our being, and weaving and unweaving us into the pattern of life itself. Our learning then supports growth.

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PART IV

GROWTH

SIX

FROM EPISTEMOLOGY TO ACTION: THE KEYS TO PERSONAL MASTERY

I entered into unknowing,

Yet when I saw myself there,

Without knowing where I was

I understood great things;

I shall not say what I felt

For I remained in unknowing

Transcending all knowledge.

ST JOHN OF THE CROSS

KNOWER, KNOWING, AND KNOWN

Among Roman Catholics, St Anthony is often invoked to help ﬁ nd something that is missing. As a child, Jan noticed that if you asked St Anthony to intercede when you had lost something (which easily happened in a rambling house with a large family), the thing that you had lost would miraculously turn up.

Jan was very curious about this process. He sensed in it something simple, yet profound. He noticed that if he was looking, say, for misplaced keys, keys dominated his mind. Appealing to St Anthony seemed to break the tunnelled ﬁxation on searching. This allowed a switch to a ﬁ nding mode. Looking with other eyes enabled him quickly to locate the missing keys, which had been invisible, although right under his nose.

In this example, the keys may be thought of as a ‘known’ or, while missing, an ‘unknown’. With a shift in the process of knowing – how we are conceiving and relating to that known – that which was unknown becomes ﬁ ndable. When the keys are lost and being sought, there is not only a process of seeking, but a knower who is somehow stuck, or at a loss, in that looking process. Appealing to St Anthony, Jan realized, is appealing to someone or something beyond oneself. This allows the knower to enjoy a different way of relating to the question of where the keys are.

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Jan noticed that these ‘miracles’ involve more than the process of knowing. He observed that if you do not really believe in St Anthony, and simply pretend as if you did, seeking did not turn into ﬁ nding. Disassociated knowledge does not necessarily lead to a meaningful shift in our lives, unless it becomes part of us. Doing ‘as if’ engages part of our knowing, but does not really engage the knower.

If the keys do turn up, we can easily draw a simple conclusion and become a believer in St Anthony as the ﬁnder of lost things. But a deeper understanding of the process of knowing involved in seeking and ﬁ nding may enable us to generalize in a more profound way. We may recognize the importance of letting go through prayer, meditation, relaxation, or

‘listening’ to oneself or the wind, in order to open to a more receptive and ﬁ nding way of knowing.

The conclusions we draw from our experience about the nature of our experience Bateson, borrowing from philosophy, called our ‘epistemology’. For Bateson, the assumptions that we make about what we know and how we know it are extremely inﬂuential in determining how we live and interact with the world. In this sense, exploring one’s epistemology does not mean abstract intellectualizing, but becoming aware of how we have been giving meaning to our experience. This is a vital key to the art of living. Becoming more aware of how we know what we know is a prerequisite for greater wisdom. This book as a whole aims to support a new kind of relationship with what we might term our ‘experiential epistemology’.

The relationship of knower, knowing, and known provides a way of understanding and approaching the deep structure underlying our relationship with pattern. Superﬁcially pattern appears as a kind of known. But the indeterminate nature of pattern, partly present in the world and partly a creation of our mental mapping, means that patterns are inseparable from our own knowing. But our knowing, too, receives its context and direction from the knower, who ‘transcends and includes them’.

Thus knower, knowing, and known form a subtle meta-pattern of central importance to a deep and healthy relationship with pattern. Knower, knowing, and known correspond to different levels of experience and touch different levels of learning and unfolding.

An orientation to the known connects us with the contents of con

sciousness, with facts, details, isolated action, and simple change. These,

in a way, are our raw materials. They are the ingredients, but not yet any

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sort of dish. With an orientation to the process of knowing, we are not only concerned with those surface elements, but with their relationship and interconnection. We are not only learning, but learning about learning. We are concerned with process and pattern in their weaving and unweaving.

With an orientation to the knower, we touch that which provides the ground and context for all our knowing – our sense of self, our identity, and role identities. We open to the deeper process of growth, which enables our life to be self-transcending.

As we go more deeply into the knower, we may ﬁnd ourselves entering that special kind of unknowing which St John of the Cross refers to in the quotation given at the opening of this chapter. We ﬁ nd ourselves

‘transcending all knowledge’ in our unknowing and, without really knowing where we are, we ﬁnd ourselves understanding ‘great things’ that may be hard to describe and express, certainly while we remain in unknowing. In that pure knowing or unknowingness we surrender ourselves fully to the deeper pattern of unfolding. We not only embrace our life as a whole; it embraces us.

An effective relationship with the known through action in the world implies developing a lot of knowing, not only about the known, but also about our own knowing. It implies that this knowing is connected to a knower who is growing and evolving in the context of a deeper ground of silence in which all our knowing occurs. For our relationship with action to be both effective and wise, we need skills oriented to handling the

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known, but we also need abilities that can connect knower and knowing to known. In that way, St Anthony can continue to help us even when we no longer believe in him as before. St Anthony becomes a symbol not only of ﬁ nding that which we have lost in the world, but that which we may have lost in ourselves.

SKILLS – A MIXED BLESSING

By its very nature, action separates. Action stimulates difference. It opens up a ﬁssure in the unity of being. It drives a wedge between self and context, between intention and execution. By turning our attention resolutely to things of the world, action extends the knower into the known, until the latter obscures the former. When this happens, action separates us from our true selves. In so doing, it also separates us from the world.

To counterbalance this shattering legacy of action, we develop skills. Skills are a particular form of patterning. Our skills are one way in which our patterning becomes operational in the world. Skills streamline our actions, organizing them into more global capabilities. As they do so, our skills bridge our sense of self and its expression in the world. To connect self and world, our skills shape a surrogate self, a pseudo-identity.

In a sense, the whole ediﬁce of our identity rests on the foundations laid by our skills. Each new skill raises a fresh pillar of selfhood. With each new skill we discover more of what we can and cannot do. We discover more about who we think we are. Our skills thus qualify the unqualiﬁable openness of our inner awareness. We lose our innocent notknowingness in the growing certainty that we are swimmers, songsters, rebel-rousers, or miscreants and hopeless failures.

Not for nothing are the external validations of our skills known as our ‘qualiﬁcations’. To qualify is to reach a new level of expertise, but it is also to deﬁne and limit. Without qualiﬁcations our ability to undo the locks closing the doors to almost any area of human endeavour would be questionable. At the same time, with our qualiﬁ cations, we ﬁ ll in the blank pages of the colouring book of our lives with the shading of selfdeﬁ nitions.

Our skills thus paradoxically separate us from ourselves, while appearing to do the opposite. For instance, through their schools most nations

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invest heavily in instilling in each generation of pupils the foundation skills for the future. We go to school to acquire skills. But in a sense, what we learn is how to be absent to our core and present to only a small part of ourselves. If, like the majority of low-ﬂying pupils, the predominant skill we acquire is the skill of failing, our main self-qualiﬁcation will be in the questionable realm of poor self-esteem. The limitations of such learning are easy to recognize, but harder to discern are the comparable limitations that so easily accompany academic success – where the mind may be cut adrift from the harbour of the heart and its berth in the body.

Schools specialize in instilling the known. There is token acknowledgement of the process of knowing. The knower is the Cinderella of every education system. Self-awareness is actually obscured by conventional education, which cultivates a mentality of splitting, separating, and compartmentalizing, allowing some connecting at the cognitive level, but in a way that does little to restore the unity of selfhood. Knowledge is gained of separate disciplines, which are divorced from the knower, isolated from each other, and cut off from their connection to life lived in the world. As a result, by the time pupils leave school, their minds may have been fairly well-honed, if they are lucky, but they are tuned to specialization and the particular, adept at boxing and labelling, rather than open to the larger unity of the ﬁeld of knowledge. Their energies may be well channelled, but they display only a fraction of the creative innocence and appetite for life and learning of a small child.

These limiting effects of conventional education persist in the working world after school. In our consulting over the years to a variety of companies, we have noticed that our clients develop a lot of skills, but somehow the skills tend to remain stubbornly context-bound. The often stiﬂ ing role-identities required for corporate life – in which a person is a

‘businessman’ or ‘businesswoman’ ﬁrst and a person second – mean that people tend to have less than optimum access to their skills. For not only does the business context separate, say, the relational skills of home and free time from the task-oriented domain of the ofﬁce, but the business context itself engenders a number of constraining sub-contexts. Skills may be poorly transferred from one corporate climate to another in a merger or change of jobs, or in a move from one market sector to another, from one country to another, from one level of an organization to another (the Peter Principle), or even from one department to another.12

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And the transfer may be poor from two perspectives. Skills may be forgotten or left behind or they may be maintained too well and prove ill adapted to the new environment. For instance, technical skills acquired before a computer screen may be useless in a human relations role. The skills required to make a company change may be ill suited to securing its longer-term stability. Skills that secured the success of the self-employed entrepreneur may be inappropriate for teamwork as the business grows. The skills needed to run a small company may match poorly with the changing context created by a rapid growth in size. Rather rare is the entrepreneur who can start a company in his basement and still lead it when it becomes a global giant. Even Steve Jobs of Apple Computer needed a spell outside Apple to make this transition.

To separate behaviour and identity in the early stages of acquiring a skill can be beneﬁ cial. It prevents us from prematurely assuming we are drivers before we have mastered driving. However, connecting behaviour and identity is an important part of the learning process. It marks the progress of potentially alien activities becoming part of our domain of inﬂ uence. To become a driver brings the driver into a different kind of relationship with his or her car. The latter becomes an extension of self, an expression and expansion of one’s presence in the world.

But, beyond a certain point, connecting identity and behaviour becomes potentially limiting. When we pass from managing to becoming a manager, we both relax into a role identity and we conﬁne other possibilities – perhaps even the potential role identity of leader.

Identity is thus a mixed blessing. Identity, as Bateson aptly recognized, goes hand-in-glove with our learning to learn. If action and behaviour express the potential for change, learning provides the contextualizing stability for that behaviour. But then our learning with its harnessing of identity through the process of identiﬁcation starts to interfere with our growing and unfolding. The question is: how can we recover that spaciousness which provides the context to our identity and various role identities, so that we can truly grow and unfold?

For this to happen, identity and behaviour must ﬁrst of all converge. But that is not the end of the matter. Ultimately, identity needs to disappear, to leave our skills and behaviour unfolding in our simply being present.

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When we identify with being a driver, we are in a sense car-conscious. Our deepest Self is submerged in auto-awareness. We are lost in the world of the known. The question is: how can we become freed of our driverness, with its subtle clamping to car, and just drive in our simple openness to experience? For when we do so, we become one with our driving. When we are truly in our driving and our driving is in us, the last traces of the driver are out of the way. Then driving becomes truly enjoyable and lovely. Its movement provides a context for a process of becoming, in which we move from A to B, while lovingly resting in our being. When identity becomes essentially transparent, instead of looking with our identity and role identities, we look through them; we operate with the immediacy and presence of our creative innocence.

Such mastery may take some time. When a young Indian sitarist came to the West for the ﬁrst time, at the age of thirty, she had already been playing her instrument for a quarter of a century. She received a lot of acclaim for her beautiful and heart-opening mastery of the sitar. But when someone referred to her as a musician, she replied softly, without a trace of arrogance: ‘No, I am not a musician, I am music.’ In a sense, these few words suggest that she had transcended her role identity as musician to become one with the music. For her, there was no separation of player, playing, or played. They formed a unity in which there was no interfering ego, only the unfolding of sound in the moment, reverberating in the hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits of both player and audience, resonating as a connecting pattern.

When action is embedded in the ﬁeld of awareness in this way, it ceases to separate. Arising from connectedness, it separates in a way that connects – just as each pulled string of our sitarist sends a note of difference ringing through space. But coming from silence in the player’s openness it stirs and restores a connection with the silence not only in the listener, but in the space between the player and the played-to.

The question, then, is: how can action be rooted in such a groundless ground? For us, an important answer is through the development of a set of sophisticated meta-skills, which we call ‘Keys to Personal Mastery’.

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KEYS TO PERSONAL MASTERY

The Keys to Personal Mastery allow us to have a creative relationship with life through the perception and management of its complex patterns. The Keys to Personal Mastery underpin our ability to generate and renew our models of the world. They help us connect with the pattern of our own lives and align ourselves with the larger pattern in which we live and move. They thus support a healthy relationship with our own selves and a more relaxed, yet pointed, participation in the world.

If ordinary skills engender role identities, which both serve us in the world and sever us from our deeper natures, the Keys to Personal Mastery go a long way towards repairing this division. Whereas ordinary skills primarily connect our knowing with the known, the Keys to Personal Mastery link our knowing to the knower – not as another role identity, but as pure presence.

The Keys to Personal Mastery presuppose a great deal of knowingness. When we rest in our knowingness, knower and knowing remain very close to each other. This proximity inevitably brings the knower into a more immediate and intimate relationship with the known. By coming closer to what we know, without losing ourselves in it, we ﬁnd we are more at home in the world. We are fully in touch with our own knowing, without disappearing in what we know.

The Keys to Personal Mastery thus represent the full ﬂowering of the skills needed to succeed in any ﬁeld of endeavour, from horse riding to hair dressing, from bus driving to business. The Keys to Personal Mastery are the overarching abilities integrating our various skills.

Without them, learning tends to be laboured and shallow. With them, learning tends to be pointed and perceptive. The Keys to Personal Mastery enable us to draw on past learning, yet respond freshly to what happens in the moment.

Beyond that the Keys to Personal Mastery bridge learning and growth. They enable us to anticipate something of what is coming to pass in the important transitions in our lives. They cannot determine growth, but they can permit a positive and supportive relationship to what is unfolding in our own lives. At the same time, the Keys to Personal Mastery are essential if we are to assist the growth of others.

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The Keys to Personal Mastery are the abilities we need in order to master the relationship between our own patterning and the patterning of life itself. They include such deep-level abilities as our capacity to be aware, to be attentive, reﬂ ect, discern, and commit. By implication, they imply an ability to be creatively open and embrace contrasting perspectives, while managing appropriately the full range of experience, and thus attend, set intention, and expand boundaries.

These capacities are of crucial importance in determining the quality and effectiveness of our interactions with the world, in the way we handle ourselves, in how we approach problem solving, and in our relationships with larger systems. A manager who can reﬂect, discern, be attentive and committed has the wherewithal to manage and lead. A manager who cannot reﬂect, discern, or be attentive will never succeed in either managing or leading. Someone who can reﬂect, discern, and be attentive is likely to balance his home and professional lives and will have the ﬂ exibility to succeed in many ﬁ elds.

At the core of the Keys to Personal Mastery is a deep capacity to rest in our awareness. Awareness is a precondition for the acquisition and expression of all our abilities. Awareness provides the ground of experience. It is a precondition for the kind of reﬂexive relationship with experience in which we can receive and respond to the feedback that life offers. Being aware is hardly a skill or even an ability. It is ‘the given’ on which these depend. It is in our awareness that performance and alignment meet. Our awareness holds them in right relationship.

In awareness, knower, knowing, and known re-converge. For when we really become at one with our awareness, we ﬁnd that our awareness is self-reﬂexive presence. Awareness, turned onto itself, knows itself as a simple knowingness. It is knower, simply aware of itself and its own knowing.

Awareness supports our ability to attend and hence the kind of attentiveness that allows us to enrich our relationships from many perspectives. If we are aware, we are able to direct our attention in different ways. How we do so depends on the nature of our intentions. Our awareness sustains the subtle directing of attention by our intention, which helps us to manage, direct and sort the various levels of our thinking and experience with discernment.

Intention gives a direction to attention. But equally, our attention provides feedback that can inﬂuence our intention, which in turn affects

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our attention, both moment-to-moment and in the longer term. What we attend to, and reﬂect upon, becomes the fertile ground in which the seeds of new intentions can sprout.

The subtle interplay of intention and attention in our awareness continues in an easy, natural, and quite inevitable way throughout each and every day. Cultivating the awareness that supports this process is not a function of our intellect. It is more an experiential returning to our own simplicity – much as we do, say, when by the sea we settle into the expanded horizon before us, as waves arise and recede and we let go of our preoccupations to rest in a moment of uncluttered presence.

In his sonnet ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’, Keats captures something of this settling of the busy mind – ‘my teeming brain’:

Then on the shore of the wide world I stand alone and think

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

These lines use the shore as a metaphor for a process of settling into expanded awareness. They also enact this settling in the reader’s mind through their word order. The poem ends by talking of a sinking to nothingness in which worldly concerns cease, leaving the reader to enjoy something of this same settling, as the poem’s ﬁnal words also sink into silence.

In such silence, the ground of reﬂ ection, we can enjoy a release from old habits, so that a new relationship with ourselves and our concerns can arise. Our minds discover something of their essential nature in and through their own wondering. Open to our awareness, we release our attachment to the worn grooves of the repeat plays of what we have already thought over and over again. We enjoy a space in which fresh thoughts can emerge, with all the innocence and purity of a hatching chick. We enter the ground of the various Keys to Personal Mastery.

DEVELOPING THE KEYS TO PERSONAL MASTERY

The Keys to Personal Mastery are elusive. The old Taoist saying, ‘the Way that can be named is not the Way’, applies to them. The Keys to Personal Mastery are more easily identiﬁed in application than in analysis.

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For instance, once we speak of ‘reﬂection’, we label a process that we easily restrict to our own habits of reﬂ ection. The word subtly separates us from our reﬂexiveness, which truly ﬁlls all manner of contexts. Even direct experience, the only way really to approach these skills, can be like catching sunlight in our ﬁngers. These subtle processes are so intimate to the knower, it is difﬁcult to have an objective ‘take’ on them. We are so close to them that they are a part of us. We are in them and they are in us. When we turn our own knowing upon them, we can come close to them, but they easily slip away, as we need to be in them to know them, and being in them we are too close to them to know them other than ﬂ eetingly.

The Keys to Personal Mastery can be nurtured, but they cannot easily be acquired systematically, unlike more straightforward physical skills such as cooking or climbing, or simple mental skills such as spelling. The Keys to Personal Mastery presume the mastery of many sub-skills, particularly those involved in change and learning. They thus only come to fruition along with considerable growth and maturation.

Effectively, these abilities develop through a two-way process. As we connect with the deep structure of more obvious active skills whether at home, at work, or in our education, we start to connect with aspects of those particular skills that are invaluable in other contexts. Conversely, as we cultivate the Keys to Personal Mastery in their own right, we start a process that enables those same skills to ﬂourish in any context where they are required.

For instance, truly discovering the deep structure of listening brings us closer to the processes of reﬂection and discernment, and above all to attentiveness. It leads us towards creative innocence, implies that we can embrace multiple perspectives, and can recognize and shift the register of our thinking appropriately.

On the other hand, as reﬂection, attentiveness, discernment, and commitment grow within us they naturally imbue our listening with a reﬂective, a discerning, a committed, and an attentive quality. And these qualities begin to extend to our experience as a whole. As such not only our listening, but our speaking, our thinking, our loving, and our living are affected.

Through this two-way process, we begin to ﬁnd that development of the Keys to Personal Mastery feeds their own development recursively.

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With appropriate intent, we ﬁnd we become more attentive, better able to know when and how to reﬂect and to be more discerning. We recognize and enliven the deep structure of our abilities so that their important elements become increasingly connected to the different contexts in our lives.

In the following chapters, we explore in more detail how each of the main Keys to Personal Mastery help us handle pattern and have a self-unfolding relationship with the processes of change, learning, and growth, both in our own lives and in our relations with others.

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SEVEN

ATTENTIVENESS

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

SIMONE WEIL

FROM ATTENTION TO ATTENTIVENESS

When he pulled the worm, as thick as a large knitting needle and as long, from his behind, Peter felt a mix of shock and revulsion. Somehow this blind dead thing seemed to embody the rottenness that he had been sensing for some days.

A few days previously, two of the craftsmen working on his home in Bali had upped and left without a word. The next day, his trusted personal assistant had mysteriously quit without explaining why. And then an old friend, still grieving the loss of his father, offended by a careless remark, had run amok, tearing up trees and shrubs in his distress.

As so often in Bali, it never seemed to rain without pouring. Peter sensed that something connected this cluster of otherwise unrelated events.

Within an hour of that unwelcome parasite coming to light, some of the mystery began to clear. Peter learned from a friend that his assistant had in fact left because he had overheard some nasty personal remarks, maliciously intended for his apparently sleeping ears.

But the chain of events was not quite over yet. Later, in buying medicine to clear his innards of any other uninvited lodgers, Peter contrived to lose his wallet with some cash and credit cards. With that he sensed he had paid his dues for whatever misalignment had entered into his relationship with the pattern which connects. The heavy sense of wrongness and foreboding he had been feeling for some days began to lift.

Reﬂecting on these events Peter noticed that there was a pattern of things and people that were important to him disappearing, along with something strange and unwelcome making an appearance. He realized that he had begun to take his connection with people and events for

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granted. In the process, he had become disconnected from the ﬂow of life around him and needed to return to an attentive connection with what was happening in his world.

While attention is primarily exercised through the senses, it ultimately involves much more. Our mind’s preoccupation orients our attention and inﬂuences its quality. Attention is also affected by our relationship with the centre of feeling in the heart. Attention centred in the heart grounds us in a way of functioning that is readily poised between inner and outer experience, and between mind and body. It offers a way of perceiving the world from a place of compassion and care.

When we do so, attention becomes attentiveness. We balance the insights of mind with the impulses and needs of our incarnate selves. We balance our needs with those of others.

Attentiveness presupposes that we are highly present to experience, with a lot of care for what is happening. At the same time, we readily notice what is unfolding in and around us. We are alert to what is happening in our perceptual ﬁ eld.

Presence, caring, and focus together shape attentiveness. Attentiveness is the ﬁ rst of the Keys to Personal Mastery. Accurate recognition of what is happening in our world is a prerequisite to handling it well. Reﬂ ection, discernment, and commitment all presuppose attentiveness.

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PRESENCE

When we are present, we are open to experience, registering it without prejudice. In being present to experience, we remain present to ourselves. Our awareness is not lost in our experiencing. Presence is rooted in self-awareness.

Presence allows us to keep a sense of the wider pattern, without neglecting detail. By embracing the larger picture, we can quickly adjust our actions in the light of new information in a way that is sensitive to the whole. Our presence bridges the range of experience, so that we are alert to shifts in the patterns around us and able to adjust our response to them.

In our presence, we recognize the subtle threads of what is happening within and without us. We are sensitive to pattern without striving for it. Poised between inner and outer experience, we ﬁnd ourselves becoming a context in which important patterns can be apprehended.

Grounded in our awareness, we are attuned to the sensitive relationship between what is and what is coming to be. Presence does not mean simply being with ‘what is’. Rather it means attending to what is unfolding. To be present is to be aware of process. We recognize how transformation is happening in the moment.

With presence, we are sensitive to the fresh sprouting of the seeds of change, oriented to the here and now, alert to news of difference. In our presence, past, present, and future are not separate. This moment connects what was with what will be, at the point of becoming. We anticipate without expecting, alert to what is coming to be without prejudging it.

While the word ‘presence’ suggests attending to what is happening in the now, its etymological roots mean ‘feeling before’. Presence thus implies a certain kind of anticipation, but not the anticipation in which we run ahead of ourselves and are anxious for the future to come quickly. Rather, we recognize in a natural way what is coming over the horizon from the future.

Such anticipation is an important part of the art of serving others well. As Mrs Wilson comments in Gosford Park.

What gift do you think that a good servant has that separates him from the others? It’s the gift of anticipation. And I’m a good servant. I’m better than good. I’m the

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best. I’m a perfect servant. I know when they’ll be hungry and the food is ready. I know when they’ll be tired and the bed is turned down. I know it before they know it themselves.

Service presupposes a lot of attentiveness, while developing attentiveness enables us to serve others and the larger pattern in a good way. In the helping relationship, in serving the client, we are often sensing what is about to unfold.

Presence is a precondition for skill in observation. When fully present, we are able to observe what is happening without judging it. We can take things as they come and respond appropriately without grasping.

When we are fully present to our experience, we are grounded in our own ﬁrst position while at the same time connected to the ﬁ eld around us. We are sensitive to the response to what is happening arising within, at the same time as we are aware of events in the wider ﬁeld about us. When we are present, we are balanced between inner and outer experience, open and receptive to both, without being dominated by either. When we are fully present, our caring and focus are most apropos and ﬂexible. In our presence, our caring includes multiple perspectives, respecting context in a way that is balanced.

CARING

Attentiveness arises from a subtle intention – to be present, open, receptive, and centred in the heart. This subtle intention gives a direction to our experience without intruding into it. Our attentiveness then has the quality of a caring mother who strikes a ﬁne balance between allowing things to be as they are and a readiness to intervene if necessary. A caring mother is aware of what her family is up to, but does not interfere unduly. She provides her children with both safety and freedom.

Attentiveness puts compassion into action, giving us a natural tendency and capacity to care for each part of our ﬁeld of experience, in a way that respects its needs, as well as ours.

With caring, we have a concern for the well-being of the whole. Caring means having the feeling that one is at once the creator of the whole and yet also a part of it. It is as if, at the same time, we have the attitude

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that everything is within us, while everything is also not in us; we are merely a part of all this. This gives a sense of responsibility for the whole, with a lot of humility before the source of our life. We can contribute to the well-being of the whole, while realizing that the way of unfolding in that whole has its own momentum and direction, which we receive. This makes our caring heart-felt without it consuming us. In our caring we are balanced between our strength and our vulnerability.

In the traditional Balinese way of life, this concern for the whole has been central, with an attempt to balance the individual’s relationships with society, nature and the spiritual (trihita karana). People honour and ﬁnd a context for, the sublime, the ordinary, and the gross, for body, mind, and spirit, or the higher, normal, and lower realms (trimandala). People honour the Divine, but also make a place for baser needs. Religious ceremonies, for instance, are also social occasions, artistic and creative events, and include a place for gambling and entertainment.

However, although people understand the principle of balancing the needs of man, nature, and spirit, there can be a gap in practice. For instance, until recently, food and other goods were wrapped in banana leaves and other organic materials. When these were thrown away, they rotted and quickly returned to nature. Now anything one buys comes in plastic bags, which are tossed into the ﬁelds, streams, and rivers with the carefree abandon formerly reserved for the old disposable leaves. However, they do not rot, but strangle plants, clog up the streams and rivers, and create an eyesore. The old habits automatically respected the broader context. The new ones do not. This reﬂects limits in the quality of presence, caring, and focus in action. It suggests that having principles is not enough. True attentiveness means receiving and responding to the feedback reaching our senses from our individual and collective actions.

It also means being sensitive to changing conditions. Caring means doing the right thing at the right time. This implies recognizing when adjustments need to be made in the light of shifts in our context. It is generally those who care who recognize when society is neglecting something important and call attention to it, sometimes at quite a cost to themselves.

There is a difference between ‘caring for’, ‘caring about’, and caring. In ‘caring for’ the object of care is prominent. ‘Caring for’ is closer to action and involves directing our caring towards the known. ‘Caring

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about’ is more connected to our internal world. It suggests values and the process of knowing. Caring is closer to our inwardness and suggests a way of being in the world. This quality of caring transcends and infuses our caring for and caring about, helping maintain a connection with the wider ecology. A suicide bomber cares deeply about certain principles, but loses the wider spirit of caring. We may care for our family and care about the condition of our environment, but it is our caring that ensures that we approach what we care for and care about with wisdom.

In consulting for a major multinational in Belgium, Jan encountered

an international director who displayed a lot of caring. When he arrived

in Belgium, it was late in August. He addressed the company almost im

mediately acknowledging that four days later, on the following Monday,

the school year was starting. He said that he was aware that employees

had small children who would be going to school for the ﬁ rst time. He

recognized the desire of parents to accompany their children and said

that those who wanted to were very welcome to do so.

This was attentive in many ways. He showed not only that he cared

for people and their families, but he became very present as country

manager in an ecological way to the company. Through his speech, he

established a lot of solidarity with his employees. He accompanied his

children to school, just as his cleaning ladies did. His thoughtfulness and

accompanying actions connected people throughout the different levels

of the organization. This helped create a positive climate throughout the

Belgian branch of the company.

This manager demonstrated that being attentive implies that we take care

not only of self, nor of other alone, but acknowledge the importance of

each of these, and of the relationship between them.

When we are caring, we not only care for others, we also are consid

erate to ourselves. When we are attentive, we tend to respect our own

deeper needs, living in a way that is healthier. We approach relationships

– whether with self or others – with both presence and distance, engagement and detachment, empathy and objectivity.

Our ability to reconcile such contrasting tendencies involves much more than a narrow, one-eyed vision. We balance our needs with those of others when are able to include a fuller sense of the different elements in our perceptual ﬁ eld and can shift our focus among them.

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FOCUS

Presence and caring provide a big frame to our experience, but attentiveness also implies an exquisite attention to detail. It is our awake senses that allow us to recognize the elements of detail within the big frame.

If caring generally involves a lot of openness, focus narrows attention down to something speciﬁc, while presence contains both in a qualitative way.

With focus, our senses are in alignment within our presence and caring. We have the ability to pick up ﬁne cues in what we see, hear, feel, touch, taste, and smell. This means that against the background of presence and caring, shifts in detail come into the foreground. Focus ﬁ xes often subtle detail, but focus itself is not ﬁxed. To attend to what is happening, we adjust our focus in a ﬂexible way to developments within the ﬁ eld of experience.

For instance, fairly early on in a coaching demonstration during a training session, a client of Peter’s touched something sensitive inside. A few tears welled up, but emerged only from her left eye. Peter noticed this small point and, wondering whether it was just a quirk, remarked about it gently to the client. From this small detail a key pattern in the client’s life emerged. She described how everything in her life was sorted in pairs of opposites. For example, what she kept for herself was very different from what she revealed to the world. She felt she was almost like two people – with a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ self, one that was admissible to others and one that was not. She experienced her left and right sides of the body as very distinct. An important part of the coaching consisted in ﬁ nding a dimension of herself that transcended and connected all these differences. In that way, she was able to begin to situate herself in an awareness that contained the polarities. She could rest in a deeper wholeness without trying to collapse the contrasting facets of herself into it.

Maintaining ﬂexibility of focus implies a healthy relationship between our conscious and unconscious minds. Shifts in our perceptual ﬁeld will often be picked up peripherally before being registered at the conscious level. Sensitivity to shifts in experience means using our senses in a particular way, which we can understand as a balance between ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’.

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Looking implies active attention to, and seeking out of, experience. Seeing is a more receptive process in which we simply perceive what presents itself to our attention.

Unconscious looking allows us to stay close to the twilight area between conscious and unconscious experience. We call this being ‘at the edge of the beam’, sensitive to what is on the fringes of our conscious focus. When we are at the edge of the beam, details we might otherwise miss can be picked up at the conscious level.

Conscious looking enables us to clarify the intuitions and hunches we pick up at the edge of the beam. Through conscious looking, we check that what we suspect to be the case is actually corroborated by genuine evidence in our perceptual ﬁeld. Developing observation skills requires a lot of conscious looking.

Conscious looking helps us sort the sometimes confused multiple messages we receive in a communication. We become better able to recognize the extent to which the explicit verbal messages and the implicit non-verbal

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meta-messages of a client are in alignment. The non-verbal meta-messages indicate a person’s underlying attitudes to what is being said. Most people pick up and respond to such messages unconsciously, but with conscious looking we can understand what is happening more precisely.

With conscious seeing, we allow ourselves to perceive pattern in our ﬁeld of experience. We assume an alert receptivity in which we are sensitive to the connections among elements of experience. In this way, patterns naturally come to our attention. Sometimes, as in the example above, a small surface detail is a cue to a much deeper pattern.

Unconscious seeing presupposes an intuitive openness to inarticulate stirrings in the atmosphere of our relational ﬁeld. Unconscious seeing allows us to pick up, almost at a preconscious level, shifts in the ﬁ eld of which we are part. In a group context or in the helping relationship, we may recognize this in an alteration in the feeling of coherence in the ﬁeld. In the training demonstration, noticing the tears coming from just one eye led both the client and the group into a very sensitive space in which there was a palpable shift in the group ﬁeld with enormous shared attentiveness to the story that unfolded from the depths of the client. Although this was a unique expression of the client, it also resonated with the group, because of the splits and divisions we all make in different ways in ourselves.

Attentiveness involves elements of both conscious and unconscious looking as well as conscious and unconscious seeing, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes in close sequence. To balance seeing and looking as well as conscious and unconscious experience, we need to be at the centre of these different modalities and able to move among them. Being present is a key to such caring focus.

Attentiveness implies not only sensitivity to relationship, but an ability and willingness to embrace experience from multiple perspectives. With attentiveness, we develop the ability to recognize when the perspective we are taking is inadequate and we need to complement a particular take on things with another, complementary point of view. Attentiveness not only supports our embracing separate realities, it also helps us know which ones to access, and when. Attentiveness makes it possible to include different perspectives fully and lovingly accept these multiple claims to represent facets of the whole.

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Attentiveness requires a clear way of distinguishing perceptual positions and contexts. Being restricted to one perceptual position with a limited focus severely restricts the quality of our attentiveness. With practice, we can begin to maintain sensitivity to multiple focuses at the same time. While registering one point of view, we remain conscious of the relationship to other perspectives.

Such sensitivity to multiple perspectives needs settled awareness. If we are too jumpy inside, with too many racing fugitive thoughts we will not be able to hold the frame in which a lot of complexity can be present at the same time.

To support such settled awareness, we may need to take time out to recover from overload and to allow calm to return. Attentiveness is generally best when we are relatively fresh. It is more difﬁ cult to be attentive when we are burnt out. Through rest and relaxation, we return to presence, we reconnect with our caring, and are naturally able to focus appropriately. Attentiveness depends on us taking care of ourselves.

ATTENTIVENESS IN THE HELPING RELATIONSHIP

With attentiveness, we approach experience in a very honest way. We receive what is, as it is, without denial. Sometimes what we would prefer to have happen blinds us to what is actually going on in our lives. With attentiveness, we are less likely to deceive ourselves in this way. In the helping relationship, this means noticing accurately what is happening, without making simplistic conclusions from past experience.

Attentiveness also implies that we approach experience in an accepting way. We recognize what is happening without railing against it. In our presence and caring, we welcome what we perceive, like someone who is at home, receiving a guest. In the helping relationship, this means welcoming whatever comes up as an expression of what is unfolding in the person and in the relationship.

Such attentiveness on the part of coach or mentor creates a space in which the client can more easily accept him- or herself. It also helps the client take a direction that is good for him- or herself. The coach’s attentiveness holds a frame in which clients can ﬁnd their own way to what is best for them.

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This possibility is well-illustrated by a teaching tale of Milton Erickson, in which a farmer found a stray horse without any identiﬁ cation and yet was able to return it to its owner. When the owner asked how he managed to locate him, the farmer explained that he simply followed the cues offered by the horse, until the horse found its own way back home. In the helping relationship, our attentiveness creates the conditions in which the client can ﬁ nd his or her way back to his or her source.

In the helping relationship, the attentiveness of the development facilitator creates a space in which the client can be present to him- or herself. Most people can recognize from their experience the powerful impact of someone being completely attentive to them. Yet, it is unfortunate that such attentiveness is rare. Many people feel that as children their parents failed to listen to them. Subsequently, others, too, generally appear not to listen.

One client of Peter’s, a young woman from the United Kingdom, regretted the failure of others to listen to her in the past, ﬁrst parents and then boyfriends. One effect of this lack in her life was that, although she had a gift for listening to others with a lot of presence, she had difﬁ culty listening to herself. As a result she was living and working in a city and country that was highly uncongenial to her, and she reported that she had lived in many wrong places. Generally, she found it hard to trust her feelings. She travelled a lot, but never felt at ease where she was. In her work there was always something missing. She found it hard to make a deep connection with people, places, or activities. Attentive listening in her coaching provided a starting point to her really hearing and feeling herself. She realized that she was only half-acknowledging core values in herself. She knew these things were important to her, but because she was not ‘heard’ in the world, she tended to deny or postpone a deeper knowledge of what was right for her. Connection with herself was a ﬁ rst step to connecting more deeply with her world – beginning with changing her relationship with where she was living and working and where she was heading in her life.

Naturally, in listening to our clients, we are also attentive to how they might not be listening to themselves. With attentiveness we are better able to respect the wider implications of what the client asks for in the helping relationship. In NLP this is sometimes termed ‘ecology’. We are attentive to the possible consequences, both positive and negative, of

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what the client is asking for. Even before the client conﬁrms them, we can anticipate the side-beneﬁts of his or her present situation. Such needs must be taken into account for the client to resolve presenting constraints. An attentive focus helps us register the non-verbal and unconscious indicators of how the person is really responding to the prospect of change.

Attentiveness is a key part of the art of performance in any ﬁ eld, and particularly for leaders if they are to be effective. Attentiveness also requires a lot of alignment in us. As we develop attentiveness, we grow in alignment while enhancing performance. This process is important in developing our abilities as development facilitators.

At the same time, an important part of the work of the coach or mentor consists in helping the client to develop his or her attentiveness. We do this in part by modelling attentiveness in our own behaviour for the client. We may also need to give speciﬁc attention to the presence, caring, or focusing of the client in order to help him or her develop these facets of attentiveness in a balanced way.

Some clients, for instance, enjoy a lot of presence and focus, but lack the spirit of caring, making them more like unengaged TV monitors. Others are caring, but lack presence and focus, thus missing important cues from the ﬁeld. In such cases, the coach or mentor will help the client develop the missing or neglected facet of attentiveness.

With attentiveness, the client is better able to develop the other Keys to Personal Mastery. Attentiveness provides us with the important clues as to what we need to attend to in our world. It suggests where we may need to direct our attention for deeper understanding. It provides clues as to what we might need to reﬂ ect more deeply on.

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EIGHT

REFLECTION

When I begin to reﬂect, my reﬂection bears upon an unreﬂective experience, moreo-ver my reﬂection cannot be unaware of itself as an event, and so it appears to itself in the light of a truly creative act, of a changed structure of consciousness, and yet it has to recognize, as having priority over its own operations, the world which is given to the subject because the subject is given to himself.

MERLEAU-PONTY

Before his son was born, Jan was concerned about how the family’s golden retriever would respond to the new baby. To his surprise, the family doctor suggested that Kobe’s ﬁrst bowel movement be fed to the dog. He said this would bond Kokai to the child and ensure that it never harmed him. How strange, yet appropriate, Jan mused, that something we generally consider useless and generally disgusting should become so valuable. Suddenly, this usually unwanted product symbolized new life, even more than the ﬁrst breath. Using this ﬁrst waste as a kind of food, he thought, provided a way not only of bonding baby to dog, but of honouring a precious event.

The doctor’s remark stimulated in Jan a way of thinking we call reﬂ ection. Reﬂection is the key to a creative relationship with life’s patterns. Through the art of reﬂection, we become sensitive, not only to the patterns we identify in the world, but to our perception and interpretation of these patterns. Reﬂection is the way to enter that subtle zone between two worlds – the world as it is, and the world we create, between things as they are and our ideas about them. Like Wallace Stevens’ listener, we become one

... who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

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The word ‘reﬂection’ evokes images of mirrors and reﬂ ecting surfaces, polished glass, shining wood, windows, pools and ponds holding cloud and sky. Such images are metaphors for our own mind, which not only holds our representations of past, present, and future, but can reﬂ ect on them. In reﬂection, our mind turns back onto itself and its own contents, leaving space for new realizations – like subterranean shoots reaching hidden gems, while binding the hitherto divided and unconnected.

The term ‘reﬂection’ covers a range of subtle experiences Sometimes we may reﬂect deliberately on a particular issue. At other times, we may welcome a free ranging of the heart and mind, which takes us into a trance-like state of consciousness. Daydreaming and reverie are akin to reﬂ ection.

Through reﬂection, we can approach our experience in a way that is neither problem- nor solution-oriented, but allows us to connect simply with what is happening in the moment. Before we can solve a problem, we need to become aware of what is. We connect directly with what is happening now, not only in its external aspects, but, more important, with its hidden meaning and our relation to it. Through reﬂ ection, we open ourselves to fresh gifts from the edges of awareness. We allow new possibilities to emerge from the deleted, distorted, or obscured portions of our response to a situation. Reﬂection allows change to ripen in us and come forth at the right time.

Gentle attentiveness is thus a natural springboard and companion to reﬂection. In his poem ‘Les Pas’ (‘Steps’), Paul Valery aptly compares the gifts of reﬂection to the bare-footed approaching steps of a loved one. The word

‘vigilance’ in the third verse suggests attentiveness to what is arising:

Tes pas, enfants de mon silence,

Saintement, lentement places

Vers le lit de mon vigilance

Procedent muets et glaces.

Your steps, children of my silence,

Holy, slowly placed

Towards my wakeful bed

Proceed mute and frozen.

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Reﬂection, this poem suggests, is a child of silence, a process in which we can invite, but not insist upon gifts. In reﬂection, we are both active and receptive. The balance between stasis and change allows new possibilities to emerge.

Reﬂection is an intimate part of the fabric of our life. It is not a luxury, but part of our humanity. The reﬂective nature of our conscious minds is one of the prime ways second-order cybernetics manifests within us as a living system. In the language of that ﬁeld we could say that reﬂ ection is a special way of giving and receiving feedback on the feedback that life offers.

Reﬂection is an essential part of a healthy relationship with the hinterland of consciousness. Through reﬂection we allow those other dimensions of ourselves outside the usual sphere of consciousness to communicate with us, sharing their hopes, needs, fears, and gifts – the body, the emotions, the unconscious, and those portions of our experience sometimes referred to as ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, and the ‘divine’.

As a culture we emphasize energy, action, efﬁciency, and achievement so much that we neglect an important aid to reﬂection, what the Italians call ‘Il dolce far niente’, ‘sweet doing nothing’. We consider doing nothing ‘idleness’, with overtones of laziness. If we listen to the sound of

‘idleness’, we are not far from associations with ‘idolatry’, the worship of idols. Yet our jealous god of unbridled action is perhaps the falsest idol of all. The effects of ill-considered action are ubiquitous in our urban sprawl and warehouse-architecture that serves economy while ﬁ tting so poorly with its locality. With our cultural bias towards proactivity, when we stop, we do not really stop. We watch television. Instead of dreaming the story of the stars in the night sky, we peer vacuously at the stars on the small screen.

More and more, we insulate ourselves from the immediacy of experience with its capacity to shock and surprise stimulating reﬂ ection. We love the sanitized, the packaged cracker, but we fear the raw and the real. A young Russian travelling to Western Europe after the break-up of the old Soviet Union surprised us by saying that she missed the smell of fresh ﬁsh wrapped up in newsprint from the market. For her, we were losing contact with the simple tastes and smells of life.

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Yet, when we neglect reﬂection, life has a strange way of forcing us to reﬂect. When we fail to connect with the undercurrents of life, it is uncanny how things happen, often tragically, to send us back to our source. For instance, the sudden death of a member of our family reminds us of what we have been neglecting, such as attentiveness to each other, to really connecting, as opposed to washing the car. Symptoms of ill health, too, are a way in which life reﬂects for us and to us. Our temptation today is immediately to treat our pangs and pains with a palliative, to take a quick aspirin rather than enquire deeply as to just what it is calling for our attention.

At a collective level, terrorist catastrophes, such as ‘9/11’ or the Bali bombs a year later, were also calls to reﬂection. While these events stimulated reﬂection in some individuals, they did not particularly shift the bias in the culture. The United States does not have a reﬂective culture, and reﬂection was quickly abandoned for a more graspable but problematic

‘war on terror’. That was a pity. So long as imbalances persist, events that invite reﬂ ection are likely to recur.

SHARED REFLECTION

We often reﬂect alone, settling into undisturbed reverie and following the untethered roaming of a freed spirit. But we can also reﬂect with others, accompanying each other into a space of quiet understanding, where idea sparks idea, synchronized in a slow waltz of undirected exchange. Reﬂ ection can provide, as Alfred de Vigny put it, ‘un bain de la solitude’ (‘a bath of solitude’). But it also offers the murmuring of love, the richness of deep and lasting friendship, and the wisdom of a group united in a common source. The Quakers recognized this a long time ago. Their meetings are occasions for collective reﬂ ection.

When Bateson observed that ‘wisdom comes out of sitting around a table, talking about differences without having to change them’, he was effectively describing reﬂection in a group. Reﬂ ection with others requires a context to hold those present together. Those reﬂ ecting are both part of their context and separated from it. The ‘table’ serves as a stable centre and a context for the sharing that is to take place. The ‘sitting around’ provides that element of stability without absorbing those

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present completely in it. ‘Talking about differences’ is the proactive side of the reﬂective process. The differences are situated on the level of content, while talking about them implies a kind of detachment from that content. Talking about differences already presupposes that there was a process of sorting for similarities and differences. The focus can be placed on the differences because the similarities and stability are supported by the relationships and context. ‘Without having to’ suggests that change may or may not happen. The participants hold themselves open to receive, without expecting or imposing a result. This provides the possibility for the self-transcendence of wisdom to appear.

Reﬂection opens a space in which the patterns of stability and change present within a system can adjust themselves. That is very different from how most people currently relate to themselves, to others, and to the world. In approaching issues reﬂectively, change, in our view, can be an effect but never an outcome. Reﬂection may change a person. It can change minds or lead to a change of heart. It may lead to change in the world. But it does not have to.

In our work with groups, we allow more and more time for reﬂ ecting on the pattern happening within the group, not simply the surface behaviours, but the pattern that connects the behaviours and interactions at a higher level. We allow space for silence. For silence nurtures reﬂ ection. In silence, individual and group patterns tend to emerge spontaneously.

Reﬂection in a group, however vital to its effective functioning, can be something of a rarity. Not many groups can relax and ﬂow with sufﬁ cient receptivity to hold a reﬂective space. In the context of teaching and training, a trainer- or teacher-centred approach rarely permits reﬂ ection. Reﬂection becomes possible when the group is process-centred, attentive to what is happening in its way of being together.

In a group, the relationship between what is being talked about and how it is being talked about is crucial. A reﬂecting group begins to interact in a way that reﬂ ects the content that it is exploring.

It may take a while before the group mind can allow a conversation among many. When a group is learning to reﬂ ect, but not yet able to do so, a person may make an important remark about what he or she is experiencing or about the patterns in the group. But what he or she says

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is easily ignored by the rest of the group. One has the sense of separate individuals functioning in their own world. Individuals or sections of the group may feel that they do not belong or are being excluded.

Goodwill alone does not enable the group to reﬂect. It must ﬁ rst cohere as a group. Group coherence paradoxically arises from the beginnings of reﬂection, while enabling further reﬂection. As the group begins to reﬂ ect, it may recognize something about itself that is connected with the patterns which had hitherto interfered with its own functioning. When this happens, tension in the group ﬁeld, which had been preventing it from performing well, is released.

Sometimes this occurs in a dramatic way. One group of Russians we worked with had remained stuck, with superﬁcial camaraderie in the bar or the sauna, but an underlying level of mutual distrust – of which they were hardly aware – present at all times. As the group reﬂected on its own situation, with a lot of discomfort and talking in circles, one participant began crawling on the ﬂoor, removing the paper plates from beneath some clay models the members of the group had made in an earlier exercise. This simple act took people out of the stuck ways of relating verbally and symbolized the removal of some of the boundaries between them. Without saying anything, the whole group began to participate in this small, spontaneous symbolic act. The atmosphere in the room suddenly softened as the participants acknowledged their collective separateness, while allowing the possibility of greater closeness. From that point on, the members of the group were able to listen to each other and hold a real conversation among many.

In the couple, reﬂection also helps resolve the tension between patterns that have become inﬂexible and the impetus towards novelty and change. Reﬂection creates a space for the habitual patterns in the couple to become self-transcending.

A married woman we encountered in France shared with us an apparently irreconcilable difﬁculty. She badly wanted a child, while her partner did not, as he had already had children with a previous partner. The more she pushed for her wish, the more she found her partner becoming entrenched in his refusal to have a child or even discuss the matter.

A win-win solution to such an issue is difﬁcult, as the alternatives desired by the two parties are mutually exclusive. Having half a child is

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not an option. As the wife put it: ‘If I have a child, he’ll resent it; if I don’t, I’ll resent it.’

It took a moment of reﬂection for Jan to perceive a way to respond to this impasse. Jan invited her to consider how she and her partner might take some time together to share the ways in which each of them both wanted and did not want a child. This, he anticipated, would create a space in which the focus could shift from the individuals to the couple as a whole. It offered the possibility of reﬂective exchange, which could allow the relationship to function in a generative way. It shifted attention from outcomes to process. In effect, it offered a pathway to a kind of relating, from which something fruitful might be born to the couple, whether a child or something else of mutual importance.

THE STRUCTURE OF REFLECTION

Reﬂection typically involves three key elements, which we call: ‘Unconditional Openness’, ‘Encountering an Enigma’, and ‘Self Reference’. These elements may follow each other or they may coincide. The sequence may also vary. Sometimes simple openness stimulates reﬂ ection. At other times, something surprising throws us out of our usual patterns and opens us up.

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UNCONDITIONAL OPENNESS

Often, reﬂection happens when we give it time and become receptive

– perhaps during a walk or break in the country. We may choose to enter a slightly altered mode of being, allowing things to come up in our awareness. As we become more receptive, we suspend or reduce our judging. We allow ourselves to not know, so that new knowing can emerge. We may initiate reﬂ ection, simply by beginning to enter such a state.

Ann Lindberg’s beautifully thoughtful book, Gifts from the Sea, describes the opening to reﬂection she experienced when staying by the ocean. The book’s title is an apt metaphor for the process of reﬂ ection, which is very much like receiving gifts from the wide waters of our own being.

Reﬂection generally begins with some detachment from our activities,

as we lean back inwardly for a while. We open to a kind of inwardness

in which we attend more to the heart. We may notice a softening of the

eyes and our breathing becoming lower in the chest. We are aware of the

outside, while becoming more peaceful. In this state, it is easier to attend

to our internal dialogue and contemplate the images that appear before

our inner eye.

We may have been trying to get something done or work something out. To reﬂect, we usually cannot continue with activity that is too complicated and end-oriented. So when we reﬂect, we generally either sit quietly or engage in some light activity that can continue in semi-automatic fashion, without requiring much from the conscious mind. For instance, walking easily lends itself to reﬂection. Wordsworth used to compose poetry in his head while on long hikes, writing down his compositions only on returning home. Rousseau, too, wrote a book describing the ‘reveries’ or reﬂections of a solitary rambler. Activities that are routine or where the outcome is unimportant allow the mind to be free for other things. Fishing can be a reﬂective sport. In daily life, driving a car, washing up, or ironing provide opportunities for detachment and allow some inner settling to occur, while we continue to be active. As we settle inwardly, we become increasingly receptive to the thoughts, feelings, and images that come and go of their own accord. We attune ourselves to, and welcome, the natural ﬂ ow in our experience.

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ENCOUNTERING AN ENIGMA

Reﬂection, then, may take us by surprise or be something we choose to invite. For the authors, something that we do not understand, but which surprises us or strikes our curiosity provides a frequent stimulus to reﬂ ection. We call this ‘encountering an enigma’. An enigma may be anything that awakens our curiosity – something odd, unusual, or quaint – such as the doctor’s suggestion to Jan, with which we opened this chapter.

In another instance, Peter was once invited to the burial of a young Balinese who had electrocuted himself while doing home repairs. However, before the body was interred at the cemetery, he noticed that many people were looking up into the heights of a tall, green tree. Then he saw that although the tree was perfectly healthy, one branch about twenty metres up was smouldering. How could it be, he wondered, that the tree could catch ﬁre there? And what was the relationship, if any, between this young life, part of the green growth of his village, burnt to waste at the age of twenty-two and this strange, but timely, ﬁ re in the tree?

On another occasion, at an important point in our careers, we were both involved in a large training project in a Russia full of excitement at the opening up of the old Soviet Union. During the training, Jan learned that he was to become a father for the ﬁrst time, and Peter that he was to become single again. The close timing of these events and their proximity to our work in transitional Russia stimulated some important musing. We wondered how these vital shifts in our own lives might be linked to our work with people in a far-off land in the throes of great change.

An enigma may appear, when we notice some dissonance in our experience. We may sense something odd or incongruent and wonder about it. For instance, once one of us was keen to receive an invitation to work in a training institute where we had studied NLP together in America. We would go out and on returning ask ourselves: ‘Is there a fax from America yet?’ This refrain became a kind of joke and also a source of reﬂ ection as to what made it so poignantly funny. On one level, we knew that there would be no fax. At the same time, we wanted the invitation to come and we were aware that we could never absolutely discount it. We recognized a certain stupidity in continuing to want something so improbable, and yet the inclination to continue wanting it was tenacious. This slightly ridiculous

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ritual also provided some cover for our rather childish eagerness to check

for other faxes that might have arrived.

Such events and perceptions easily cause us to ask: How can this be? What can this mean? Provided we do not rush to a conclusion, such questions support reﬂection. In fact, formulating a question or, more precisely, entering a state of questioning and wonderment is an excellent way to create or encounter an enigma. While an enigma is often something bizarre that we just happen to encounter, it can also be something that emerges as the fruit of our own curiosity, imagination, and questioning. Everyday life provides an abundance of opportunities for reﬂ ection. The more reﬂective we become, the more likely we are to notice such possibilities and respond to them.

Finding or formulating a question is much easier when we are already curious about something. For instance in writing this chapter, we were curious to know more about the process of reﬂection. We asked questions like: What is reﬂection? How do we know when we are reﬂ ecting? How is reﬂection like and unlike thinking? What makes it so important? What makes it fascinating? What makes reﬂection so elusive? What is the relationship between a reﬂ ex and reﬂection? What do mirrors have to do with reﬂection? What is the difference between the reﬂections in a mirror and the reﬂ ections in our minds?

Such questions cannot easily be answered by the intellect alone, particularly as in this instance they refer directly to the process of reﬂ ection. One has to reﬂect for the answers that arrive to illuminate the initial enigma.

Ambiguity and paradox also provide enigmatic sources of reﬂ ection. A simple exercise from the training work of psychotherapist Stephen Gilligan illustrates how multiple meanings in our experience can invite reﬂection. In Gilligan’s exercise, a participant reveals something he or she holds to be important and true about him- or herself, couching it in the form of a simple ‘I’ statement, for instance, ‘I am an honest person.’ Another participant feeds this truth back to the participant verbally:

‘You are an honest person.’ Meanwhile a further participant formulates a statement that brings out the opposite quality to the ﬁrst statement. For instance, ‘And you are also a person who deceives himself.’ Then both the participants who are providing the feedback add together: ‘And isn’t it nice to know that you can have both at the same time?’ Since every

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quality is connected to its opposite, this simple format inevitably reveals paradoxical truths that stimulate reﬂ ection.

In fact, taking any signiﬁcant statement and turning it around is an easy way to trigger reﬂ ection. For example, in some of our trainings, we ask participants what they want from the training. Then we ask them to consider how what they want is also something they do not want. Subsequently, we ask how the relationship between their wanting and their not wanting points to something beyond either, which they truly want. At ﬁrst this kind of question can be quite puzzling. But it inevitably leads to some reﬂ ective insights.

Natural settings may also connect us with an enigma. Being in nature may allow us to detach ourselves from our usual habits of mind and settle into ourselves. As we become quieter, we may spontaneously notice something in the world around us – a tree, a landscape, a busy stream, or a cloud-shrouded mountain. What we perceive then becomes the nucleus of a reﬂ ection.

For both of us, solitary retreats in nature have been occasions in which we found we had time to allow ordinary experience to settle, yielding to a kind of fertile emptiness in which we could be sensitive to mind’s empty presence, while open to the shimmering immanence of embodied ideas about us – sky, rocks, river, bird, branch, and beast.

As Emerson commented in Nature, ‘man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes through every other being to him.’ As such, almost anything in the natural world can bring us to new insights about the familiar. For instance we might study a tree and then ask: What does this tree teach me about my parents? We might ﬁnd we discover more about the patterns involved in their relationships with each other and to ourselves than we might by a more conventional analysis.

On a personal retreat, in Arizona’s ‘red rock country’, Peter realized that the red sandstone ledge he was sitting on, at about 2,000 metres above sea level, had been the ﬂoor of a sandy sea. This observation stunned him. How could these red hills so high above the sea have once had sea ﬂowing over them? Seeing the hundreds of feet of layered deposit below him, he was reminded of the vast time frames within which change happens in nature, compared with the puny span of a single lifetime. The

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natural setting inspired rumination on the awesome aeons of time in the natural world compared to our own fragility.

Ritual and reﬂection in nature send us backwards and forwards between the patterns immanent in nature and those present within our lives. On one occasion, we celebrated a major career transition towards becoming NLP trainers with an impromptu ceremony on a beach near Big Sur in California. We were astonished to feel as if the elements around us were participating in marking out our resolution. Seated in a simple mandala in the sand, Peter felt as if wind and sea and sky contrived to whisper simple truths pertinent to the moment. Immediately on his rising to enter a cave, a wave lapped up the beach and swept the mandala clean after twenty minutes of uninterrupted calm. In the cave, he felt as if the earth received his wishes and contrived to wash a heart shaped stone into his path as he left the cave, as if to sign and seal his intent. Interestingly, this treasured pebble soon disappeared from his belongings, only to reappear months later in the pocket of a pair of trousers that he put on for his ﬁ rst major presentation as an NLP trainer before 175 participants in Russia.

Such events arise from the simplicity of reﬂection, while also inviting it.

SELF REFERENCE

Once reﬂection is under way, we may go more deeply into our chosen subject, exploring connections with other aspects of our world. We are receptive to the images, thoughts, and feelings that arise in response to our inner questions, but subtly active too, following particular strands of thought that catch our attention. We become more sensitive to the hidden pattern of relationships and connections we may have been ignoring.

This process recalls Norman F. Maclean’s observation in A River Runs Through It that ‘All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable, that makes you see something that you hadn’t noticed before, that makes you see something that isn’t even visible’. Starting from the known, we ﬁnd ourselves exploring neglected aspects of what is there, until we discover something implicit, but hidden, in the surface pattern of things.

Similes, metaphors, and symbols arise spontaneously. Often the very elements that triggered our reﬂection – sea, river, forest, or sandstone ridge – mirror patterns of signiﬁcance pertinent to our concerns. Our

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reﬂection begins to reﬂect itself, as multiple levels of meaning coexist, recalling each other. Our mind reﬂects on the sea, which becomes a symbol of the mind reﬂ ecting on it, and so on.

This self-referential quality, when the reﬂected upon becomes intertwined with how we are reﬂecting on it, is well illustrated in Paul Valery’s poem, ‘Le Cimetiere Marin’. This meditation on the themes of life and death in a cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean in the town of Sete evokes the pattern of reﬂection in general through its images, structure, and rhythms.

Reﬂection typically involves an initial inner settling often matched by a quietening of the natural world about us. This is suggested by the opening image: ‘Ce toit tranquille, ou marchent des colombes’ (‘This quiet roof, where doves are walking’), which compares the sea seen from above the town with its white-caps to a dove-covered roof. Interestingly, the juxtaposing of ‘tranquille’ (‘quiet’) and ‘marchent’ (‘walk’) points to the lively balance of settled and active qualities in the scene, characteristic of reﬂection. There follows a deepening meditation in which the poet confronts the enigma of the eternal presence of time seemingly standing still on a hot afternoon, and the mysterious processes of living and dying suggested by the cemetery around him. Finally, as his thought crystallizes, there is a moment of resolution or insight and a rousing and return to action reﬂected in the quickening breeze: ‘Le vent se leve; il faut tenter de vivre’ (‘The wind is up; one must try to live’).

This poem, like so much good elegiac poetry, ﬁnds outer events mirroring an inner meditation (or is it the other way round – an inner meditation mirroring outer elements?). In either case, reﬂection, by its very nature, involves a subtle recursiveness. When we look at clouds reﬂected in still water, the clouds in the water mirror the clouds above. But the clouds in the sky can be perceived also as reﬂections of those in the water. And both are reﬂected in the perceiver. Reﬂ ector, reﬂecting, and reﬂ ected call forth each other in ways that are both fascinating and elusive.

It is no accident that the Nymph ‘Echo’ has a prominent place in the myth of Narcissus, nor that Paul Valery, for whom reﬂection was so important, should choose to write a long poem on this subject. As we reﬂ ect, we become aware of the process of reﬂecting itself. We become aware of ourselves as reﬂ ectors. This is what makes reﬂ ection both fascinating and tantalizing. In coming closer to ourselves, we discover an intimacy

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in which there is an unbridgeable distance. Like Valery’s Narcissus encountering his own image, our thinking brings us closer to ourselves, but as long as there is reﬂecting, the reﬂector and the reﬂected remain both exquisitely close and impossibly separate. Narcissus can almost embrace his own image. He would love to do so and be united with it, but this would destroy the very image to which he is attracted.

This increasing intimacy of reﬂ ector, reﬂ ecting, and reﬂ ected upon frequently engenders a kind of logic that is turned in on itself. We may wonder how our thinking about our thinking is reﬂected in our thinking. This may point to some arresting patterns or even incongruities in our relationship with ourselves.

We may ﬁnd ourselves entering the kinds of mental places where we become sensitive to questions that are in themselves self-reﬂ exive. For example, a question such as: ‘How should one respond to a question that was allergic to answers?’ might draw one into some interesting reﬂ ective spaces. The drawings of Escher provide a popular and graphic example in the visual arts of such self-reﬂexiveness. Sometimes such drawings can offer a profound illustration of the paradoxes of approaching self-knowledge. The phrase ‘self-knowledge’ itself reﬂects some of this ambiguity. It can point to knowledge about the self, the knower. It also suggests a circuit in which knowledge knows itself, perhaps excluding the knower, while connecting a knowing and a known.

Such insights are the fruit of a certain kind of reﬂection and they point to something ambivalent in the very nature of reﬂ ection. Reﬂ ection can lead to a quickened relationship with our own humanity, in which we connect with life’s underground springs and are nourished by a deeper intimacy with our own selves or our own knowing. But reﬂ ection, disconnected from its own heart, can also, like Escher’s work, lead into an interesting intellectual labyrinth that is sterile and empty. We can become preoccupied with our own cleverness in enjoying logic chasing its own tail. The problem of the chameleon contemplating itself in the mirror is one of undiscovered identity. This shadow side of reﬂ ection is also present in the myth of Narcissus, whose self-absorption is both beautiful and barren.

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REFLECTION IN THE HELPING RELATIONSHIP

Ease in the art of reﬂection makes the difference between the master and the journeyman in accompanying growth and development. The coaching and therapeutic relationships presuppose reﬂ ection throughout.

For instance, it helps for the coach to receive each new client with a lot of openness, recognizing that everybody is an enigma, not least to him- or herself. The coach’s experience with the client always offers a stimulus to reﬂection, both during and between sessions. The client inevitably expresses more than can be grasped by the conscious mind and less than the total ramiﬁcations of what he or she displays outwardly. As a result, the coach is never far from an enigma.

The helping relationship presupposes a lot of not knowing, both on the part of the coach or therapist and on the part of the client. Together, they engage in a quest to discover something that is a mystery to them both. If what is sought is already understood, there is little point in starting a process of coaching or therapy. The helping relationship thus naturally becomes a context for reﬂ ection.

This is particularly important when the focus is on assisting growth rather than on simple change or learning issues. Since growth presupposes a realignment in the person as a whole, it is best supported by a reﬂective approach sensitive to creative insight from deeper levels of the psyche, beyond the conscious mind.

In practice, sometimes the facilitator will be reﬂecting privately as a way of reaching a deeper understanding about what is happening and how best to proceed. At other times, he or she will be stimulating reﬂ ection in the client. Thoughtful questions or stories and pointed observations are ways of presenting the client with an enigma as a starting point for reﬂ ection.

Sometimes both coach and client enter a process of shared reﬂ ection in which, with a lot of openness, they circle around an enigma. This may be highlighted by either client or guide. ‘How can it be,’ the client may muse, ‘that this always happens in my work?’ ‘How is it possible that this is so important to you?’ the coach may wonder.

Such open exploration naturally touches the self-referential quality of reﬂection. On one level, the client’s patterns are inevitably reﬂ ected in the relationship with the coach. So what is being explored is never far

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from how the client is expressing it to the facilitator, nor far from how it is being manifested in the relationship itself. Touching this dimension of how what is expressed in the relationship is an expression of what is being explored often throws light on the client’s mystery.

On another level, in the process of shared reﬂection, often it is when both client and coach settle into a moment of pregnant silence that a new insight emerges. Sometimes, it is the coach’s attentive presence that holds a space for the client to allow a new insight to crystallize. Sometimes, the coach in a moment of shared quiet receives a fresh insight that will trigger a new phase in the process. Often, there is a rich interplay as mutual insights set off a chain of discoveries on both sides.

Sometimes to facilitate growth and development the coach has to help the client develop the ability to reﬂect. The lack of this ability may be what is hampering the client from performing effectively. The coach’s way of approaching issues can provide a model for a more reﬂ ective way of relating to experience. The coach may also set tasks or offer explicit instruction to point the client in a reﬂ ective direction.

A guest at Peter’s centre on a largely self-guided retreat displayed a great deal of attentiveness. She was also very committed to the process she was engaged in and very discerning about what was happening in her life. It became clear to Peter, however, that, while she was asking some good questions, she was approaching those questions in an analytical fashion. This made it difﬁ cult for her to reﬂ ect and she felt stuck. When she approached her questions with a lot more wondering and curiosity as to what was the really crucial question, and allowed herself to love her questions and live with them without rushing to an answer, reﬂ ection became possible and fruitful.

Without the ability to reﬂect, vision, creativity, and imagination are likely to be underdeveloped. These qualities make the difference between the ordinary person and the leader with ﬂair. Business and poetry are rarely mentioned in the same breath. But a dimension of poetic reﬂ ectiveness is essential for creative insight and the visionary grasp of the wider picture at the highest levels.

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A CREATIVE PROCESS

Reﬂection is a creative reaching into the unknown. It is much like ﬁ shing. For instance, we settle by a river or pond and the stillness of the water invites a corresponding stillness in us. Within that stillness there may be a point of attention – the ﬂoat – providing a small element of difference in the expanse of quiet glassiness. The ﬂoat serves as a connection between a world we can see and know directly and another, in which other life-forms swim, but which we cannot ourselves inhabit. Generally, we cannot even see the ﬁsh. Small movements of the ﬂoat may indicate their presence, bringing news of something stirring in the depths. Then perhaps the ﬂ oat bobs and streaks off and down. We feel the line tautening. The rod bends and we pull back, though not too hard or we snap the thread connecting us to what has stirred in the depths. We can assume that a ﬁsh has taken the bait and is now ﬁghting for its life. We do not know how big the ﬁsh is, nor even what kind it is, but its presence is already perceptible. Our quietness is now vibrant with a rush of excitement. If we are patient and persistent in our struggle with the ﬁsh, we eventually reel it in, and can see and even touch it as we land it. Perhaps it is a smallish one, to be returned to the waters from which it came, quickly forgotten. Perhaps we have a prize catch that will linger in the memory in the years to come.

Generally, the process of reﬂection leads to a moment of insight, although it does not have to. That moment may be brief, but it is astonishingly rewarding. One might argue that true reﬂection in its purity actually only occurs in that instant of reﬂective insight. All the rest is either preparation or assimilation and follow-up to that point of discovery. As our

REFLECTION AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Unconditional Openness:

Detachment and Settling

Encountering an Enigma:

Engagement and Exploration

Self Reference:

Reflexive Insight, Renewal, and Return

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attention turns delicately back on itself, we encounter a spacious quiet in which the process of discursive reﬂecting momentarily ceases. It is as if reﬂector and reﬂected-upon become one in an instant of pure reﬂ ection. In that moment of reﬂective unity, the new and unexpected emerges with a ring of freshness and rightness, an appropriate and pointed response to the initial enigma.

This kind of satisfying ‘Aha!’ experience makes reﬂ ection inherently creative. Reﬂection is intimately linked to the creative process as described by Wallas, with its phases of preparation, incubation, illumination, execution, and veriﬁcation. To solve problems, we need to let go of stuck and ﬁxed ways of thinking and allow ourselves to be open and receptive to the gifts of our full intelligence, beyond our usual conscious thinking. The phases of preparation and incubation often involve reﬂ ection, while illumination corresponds to the self-referential moment in which knower and known meet in pure knowing. The creative insights from reﬂ ection, too, lead to fresh action and application in daily life. Our moments of pure knowingness are intrinsically generative.

REFLECTION AND CREATIVE INNOCENCE IN DAILY LIFE

Reﬂection, then, both depends upon awareness and helps unfold it. When we reﬂect, we become aware not only of what we are reﬂ ecting upon, but of the process of reﬂ ection itself. We become conscious of ourselves as reﬂ ectors. A ﬁre not only invites reﬂection, but as our attention gets drawn into its dancing ﬂames, its ﬂickering recalls the glimmering of our own consciousness. In reﬂecting, we become more aware, not only of the contents of consciousness, but of our own perceiving. We recognize that our being aware provides the context in which whatever we experience is reﬂected. Whenever we reﬂect and whatever we reﬂ ect upon, we ultimately reﬂ ect in and on ourselves.

Reﬂection thus has some similarities with the process of meditation. However, a key distinction between reﬂ ection and meditation is that the latter aims for union with the ground of self-awareness. Reﬂ ection, in contrast, takes us into a deepening relationship with the reﬂ ections within consciousness. What we reﬂect on is brought into relief by our awareness. It is illuminated but not transcended. At times, we may wonder, ‘Does

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the mirror reﬂ ect us, or do we reﬂ ect upon the mirror?’ But in reﬂ ection, knower, knowing, and known generally remain distinguishable, however intimately connected. Thus our perception of the lake on the summer evening, reﬂecting clouds and dragonﬂies, is heightened. We are aware of the pattern which connects our inner spirit to it in a web of quiet knowing, and we enjoy the hush of that inner peace which is both part of our deepest being and a reﬂection of the peace about us. Knower, knowing, and known are drawn into a multiple mirroring, which both connect and maintain the distinctions among them.

This for us is the purpose of reﬂ ection. It provides a kind of knowing that is sensitive to transcendence but does not disappear into it. It invites transcendence to come forth and reﬂect immanence, so that which is beyond both knower and known infuses our knowing. Then both transcendence (the ground of our inner being) and immanence (the being within all things) are lively and at one. We recognize their subtle distinctiveness and ultimate identity in our own essence. In the language of Ken Wilber, the ascending and descending paths (towards pure spirit and towards immersion in the material world) are subtly poised and balanced.

Reﬂection thus helps promote self-awareness and an awareness of the nature of that awareness. We recognize how we set the boundaries to self, what we include as parts of ourselves and what we hold at a distance outside. We pass from the grosser aspects of our self deﬁnition – through our sex, age, social class, cultural group, economic status and education, for instance – to the more subtle aspects of our presence or absence to portions of experience and the way in which we punctuate the world, to the boundaries of ‘I’ and ‘we’, of ‘mine’ and ‘ours’. We come both to perceive and receive ourselves, on the many levels of our lives. We recognize our involvement and our separateness, in that subtle witnessing awareness which reﬂ ects everything, including our little selves.

In a sense, everything changes except our awareness. Our awareness, like the mirror or the sky, remains a constant, whatever passes within it. To connect with our awareness is to connect with the only element that remains unvarying throughout the ups and downs of life. Reﬂ ection supports a growing connection with this element of stability in the changing patterns of our daily lives.

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Thus, reﬂection is not some disembodied activity in which we withdraw from the world. By bringing knower and known together, it connects us with our acting in the world in a way that transcends our involvement in a particular context. Over time, the habit of reﬂection gives rise to an openness in daily life in which we are present to the world and immediately responsive to it. We are in touch with our innocence in more than just ﬂeeting moments. As this happens, we ﬁnd that our innocence is lively and creative at all times. We no longer need to detach from experience to reﬂect on it. We respond directly to life’s reﬂ ections within the mirror of our being through our creative innocence. Our inwardness is present and engaged, even in the thick of action. That is the eventual gift of reﬂ ection.

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NINE

DISCERNMENT

When the blackbird ﬂew out of sight,It marked the edgeOf one of many circles.

WALLACE STEVENS, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’

INTRODUCTION

King Solomon’s court was famous for the quality and speed of its justice. Much of this was due to the sagacity of the king himself. When two women each claimed to be the mother of a new-born baby, Solomon, asked for his sword. He announced that he would settle their dispute by cutting the baby in two and giving them half each. This would resolve the matter in a fair way, he proposed. Immediately, one of the women said, ‘No! No! Let her take the child.’ Solomon then declared this woman to be the mother of the baby, as only a real mother would rather give away her

child than see it die in such a capricious way.

In this instance, Solomon did not use his sword to perform its cutting function in a literal way, but he used his intellect like a sword to cut to the core of the dispute. He quickly found a way to elicit the truth, bypassing the long and arduous process of hearing claim and counterclaim, in which it is possible that one party lies more convincingly than the other can tell the truth.

This kind of insightful use of the mind to guide perception and action we call ‘discernment’. Discernment is the third of the Keys to Personal Mastery vital to a ﬂourishing relationship with life’s shifting patterns. Attentiveness ensures we bring an embracing presence to the various facets of what is happening to us. Reﬂection lets us turn back on our experience, so that something new may emerge in our awareness. And discernment allows us to evaluate and reﬁ ne the insight we receive.

Discernment may be deﬁned as the right use of the intellect. It helps us resolve uncertainty, make choices, and take a direction. It enables us

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to evaluate the quality of our experience and the consequences of our actions.

Discernment helps us choose appropriately when choice is possible. It also helps us recognize when we do not have a choice, so that we can respond with forbearance or whatever the situation demands.

Since our response to events affects both ourselves and others so much, the quality of our discernment has enormous impact on the quality of our lives.

MAKING DECISIONS AND SETTING A DIRECTION

‘Discernment’ has an old-fashioned ring these days. It recalls a time when people were more concerned with how to resolve moral and ethical dilemmas.

Today, we live in an age of great relativism. We recognize that our choices of action are culturally biased. Moreover, chaos theorists suggest that the pattern of life is so complex that any action can have unpredictable consequences. As a result, many people conclude that choice is a matter for individual preference.

But our actions are not neutral. They often have far-reaching consequences. Our choices inﬂuence not only the material and exterior aspects of our lives, but the subtle fabric of our inner lives, too. The effects on others can also be considerable. A few fanatics can destroy the lives of whole communities. Decisions by corporate executives and civic leaders affect millions of people everyday.

While it is possible to argue that all options are equal, generally we consider some consequences preferable to others. We can never anticipate all the effects of our actions, but it is worth making the best choices we can.

When Peter was fourteen, he had to choose between studying Latin or Chemistry. This choice implied much more than simply selecting one discipline over another. In the highly specialized English education system, he was effectively deciding whether to opt for the sciences or the humanities throughout his further education. This choice also had career implications. Peter recognized the importance of choosing well, but advice from teachers was of little help and there was no father at home to guide the decision. He felt that he had to ﬁ nd his own way to a satisfying decision.

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He went over the options again and again in his mind, ﬂ ipping backwards and forwards among the possibilities. He realized that it was not enough to decide whether he ‘liked’ Latin or Chemistry more, or whether he was ‘better’ at one than the other. He needed to ﬁgure out the appropriate grounds for a decision.

Eventually, one day while walking under the oak trees of his school towards the assembly hall, he glimpsed a patch of sky through the twisted branches and his mind cleared. He suddenly saw that studying the sciences meant focusing on the objective, outer aspect of reality. He sensed that the humanities embraced feelings, perceptions, and the inner world. The humanities had more to teach him about who and what he was. His own life was a mystery that he needed to explore, before he could justiﬁ ably attend to other matters. His choice was now clear; he opted for Latin. Although he revisited this decision from time to time to check whether he was still on track, this decision set a direction for life that still inﬂ uences his present.

The experience also taught him something about the nature of discernment itself. He recognized what he needed to do inwardly to resolve future dilemmas. In important matters, he realized, he needed to think things through till he reached the same kind of clarity and certainty that he had experienced in relation to this decision.

Beyond choosing, Peter’s example illustrates how discernment helps us ﬁrst recognize and then follow a deep direction in life. Our general orientation in life has a profound effect on what we do and learn and on the direction of our growth and development. To recognize our direction in life with discernment is an important step in supporting our own development. Helping others set a direction is one of the most valuable services of the development facilitator.

Direction inﬂuences choice of intention. But our various intentions also have a bearing on our choice of direction. Discernment helps us manage the relationship between our overall direction and short and long term intentions. It helps us identify a direction and set intentions sensitively so that they match the context of our lives as a whole.

This is important. Often, while we wish to behave in one way, we act in another. When this happens, we may feel that we have a ‘good intention’, but something stops us following it. Setting intention does

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not require bullying or force, which implies that we are actually divided in our intention, part of us wanting something and part not wanting it. In such cases, discernment may be particularly important, as an older, stronger, and possibly long forgotten intention may be inﬂ uencing us unconsciously. It may take considerable discernment to recognize and resolve such conﬂ icts.

When we select our intentions with discernment, we are able to choose outcomes while taking our doubts and other needs into account. When we have an intention with which we can align ourselves, we also give a direction to our attention. We can then allow things to take their course, using our discernment to monitor our unfolding relationship with our intention. Does it continue to be worthwhile? Are we taking the right steps to its realization?

Discernment like reﬂection involves a balance between proactivity and receptivity. But whereas reﬂection leans towards receptivity, discernment leans towards proactivity. Discernment is responsible. It helps us recognize when it is appropriate to give something up, to yield to events or to compromise on principles. It helps us know when we are simply being stubborn or self-serving in a way that does not do justice to our true selves. And it helps us recognize when we should take a stand and hold fast to inner truth, whatever the cost.

Discernment, in conjunction with attentiveness, helps us tally the consequences of different courses of action, and choose according to their implication in the wider pattern of events. Discernment implies sensitivity to detail and a capacity to absorb the bigger picture. Discernment is sensitive to history, recognizing the evolutionary strands that shaped the present moment; it also anticipates how the pattern of the present might unfold in the future. Through discernment, we can recognize when the present pattern has shifted and, if necessary, identify in what way. Discernment thus implies an ability to sense a larger pattern than the conscious mind can comprehend. The discerning mind both embraces like a mother and cuts like a sword.

This is the deeper meaning of knowing right from wrong. Knowing right from wrong means having an internalized sense of potential consequences in and around us. Such sensitivity is guided by our values and, ultimately, by universal values, such as our sense of what is good, beautiful, and true.

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Such principles guide the development facilitator, while he or she is also working to awaken them in the client.

Being discerning does not mean we automatically know what we need to know. Rather, discernment comes into play when our present understanding of a situation is incomplete and we recognize that there is more to investigate. Perhaps we notice cues that invite us to initiate a process of enquiry. It takes attentiveness to recognize such signals and discernment to know how to respond to them appropriately. For instance, in the helping relationship, attentiveness will help us notice many small cues. Discernment will help us pick out in what is said, or in the manner it is conveyed, those elements likely to warrant further exploration.

Our ability to be discerning grows with the subtle intention to be so. Having the intention to become discerning supports the development of that ability. However, intention alone is not enough to develop discernment. Discernment presupposes a considerable process of development and maturation. Discernment implies sensitivity to the full range of experience, which we call ‘multi-levelled thinking’ and the ability to recognize and manage pattern.

Discerning the principal patterns in our experience not only supports intellectual development, it helps us mature. As we learn to discriminate ﬁnely in the subtle margins of experience, we understand our own nature better and recognize how our ﬁlters of thinking and perception shape what we take to be reality. Such unravelling of the thinking implicit in our thinking involves the subtle processes we have called ‘reﬂ ection’ and ‘attentiveness’. It also proceeds through, and helps develop, that subtle and perceptive use of the mind and intellect, which we call ‘discernment’.

In discernment, we use our intellect and senses together in a way that is ﬁnely balanced between perceiving and judging. To discern, in one of its meanings, is to perceive. Discernment involves a ﬁne use of the senses. Thus we can discern a slight shift in the density of a thick mist. In discerning, we notice slight distinctions. For instance, we can discern who is approaching from their footsteps or their knock upon the door. Such discerning includes not only perceiving but also recognizing the meaning or signiﬁcance of what we perceive. By extension, discernment could be deﬁned as a process of making judgements with some taste and

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thoughtfulness. Thus the discerning reader is selective. Such a reader is also sensitive to the quality and value of what he or she is reading.

THE PROCESS OF DISCERNMENT –DIFFERENTIATING, COMPARING, AND CUTTING THROUGH

The process of discernment, we propose, generally involves ﬁ rst making distinctions (differentiating), than exploring the ramiﬁ cations and implications of those distinctions, and ﬁ nally cutting through to a solution or conclusion. Each of these elements is important, though the whole process may happen quickly.

DIFFERENTIATING

While writing this chapter, we were invited to attend a Balinese dance performance in a nearby village. In ‘Joged Bungbung’, a number of young girls, dressed in classic costume with much gold and brocade and an ornate, ﬂower-laden headdress, dance one by one with ‘volunteers’ from the audience. Each dancer has her own personality and style but must be able to improvise with the great variety of audience members, many of whom seek to unsettle her and steal some intimacy. She needs to be alert, ﬂexible, open to humour, but able to maintain her dignity and control in

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the face of great provocation, as her partner plays with her, now distant, now jealous, now offended, now erotically provocative, now closing in for a sudden kiss.

The ﬁrst dancer to appear was tiny, but electric in her movement. She had total control of orchestra, audience, and hapless volunteers, who were often skilful performers themselves. Each encounter provided an engaging mini-drama, with a beginning, development and sudden end.

As the second dancer emerged through the stage curtains, we watched with some interest. ‘What will she be like?’ we wondered. She appeared at least as accomplished technically, but less satisfying to watch. We were curious as to why this should be so apparent, as there was not much to choose between them in terms of technique.

For both of us, identifying who was the better dancer began with the recognition that there was indeed a difference – quite simply that there were in fact two dancers – and they were in some way different both in themselves and in the way they related to audience, orchestra, and partners.

Differentiating involves recognizing what is in our ﬁeld of experience, but entails more than just perception. Like pattern recognition (which plays an important role in differentiating), this process is both active and creative, and coloured by our internal maps. How we mark difference creates the frame for our discerning. For instance, the question of who was the better of the two dancers restricts the ﬁeld of enquiry to the ﬁ rst pair of performers. But we could have enlarged the frame to include the performers who followed or other types and styles of dancing.

In discernment, we generally need to ﬁnd our way to an answer to an issue or question whose resolution is not immediately apparent. (If it were, we would not need discernment.) In differentiating, we may distinguish between surface appearances and deeper patterns and structures. Asking ourselves questions, such as ‘What is not immediately apparent, but implicit and inﬂuential here?’ helps expose the hidden elements essential for discernment.

COMPARING

In comparing, the emphasis is no longer on ﬁnding the elements for consideration, but on sorting out the relationship among them. What similarities,

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differences, and connections are present? If differentiating leans towards perceiving, comparing leans towards judging and evaluating. In comparing, we take the ﬁ rst steps in making a judgement.

To evaluate something, we need to have appropriate criteria. With the dancers, we took a while to identify the criteria we were using that let us know what made one dancer more compelling to watch than the other. We found ourselves exploring the kind of distinctions between them that seemed to determine which one had the edge – perhaps the quality of the movement of hands, feet, and body, or the way each dancer managed the relationship with her partners or the audience.

Discernment, as such, not only depends on our having appropriate criteria, but on being able to recognize the pertinent criteria in the ﬁrst place. We may need to differentiate a number of criteria, and then compare them, before we have the ability to cut through to the core of an issue, which we sometimes call ‘the organizing principle’. For example, it was important for Peter to consider whether he preferred Latin to Chemistry or vice-versa. It was also important to consider whether he was more able to succeed in one subject or another. However, neither ‘ability’ nor ‘preference’ was a sufﬁciently compelling criterion to determine his choice. He had to search for other criteria and compare them, before the appropriate yardstick for the decision could emerge.

Comparing implies that there are at least two contrasting elements. But it may also mean we use more than one way of comparing – such as intellectual analysis combined with sensitivity to feelings, or internal analysis combined with discussion with others. The inclusion of different loci of attention, levels of experience, or time frames (comparing present with past, for instance) can also enhance our comparing.

While we were searching for the essence of excellence in ‘Joged’ dancing, the observations we shared with each other about our perceptions stimulated our thinking to include elements and perspectives we might have missed on our own. It is sometimes said that ‘It takes two to know one’. Just as two eyes together create a sense of depth and perspective, so the double description of a person or situation provides the possibility of an extra dimension emerging, implicit in the relationship between them, but not present in either one alone.

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CUTTING THROUGH

Discernment may involve a lot of differentiating and comparing. Ultimately, however, that process must culminate in some incisive cutting through to the core of the matter in hand. With the dancers, we noted that the second dancer seemed more inward and reﬂ ective, while the ﬁ rst was imbued with both passion and presence. She appeared precariously balanced between an inner connection with self and a radiant readiness for the world around her. This quality seemed to touch the heart of the differences we noticed between the two.

Cutting through often happens when we identify the key criterion (or criteria) pertinent to the particular context where we have a judgement to make. With the dancers, poise between inner and outer was the difference that made the difference between them. In Peter’s choice between Latin and Chemistry, the realization that self-knowledge had ultimate priority for him enabled him to cut through to the heart of the matter. As soon as he realized that penetrating deeper into the mystery of life was crucial for him, he knew which subject to take.

The criteria we use to make important judgements are intimately connected to our personal values. The more developed our sense of what matters to us, the more rapid our discernment. We can apply our discerning directly to the matter in hand, rather than ﬁrst engaging in a lengthy process of sorting out what is important.

Because of its connection to our guiding values and principles, cutting through typically involves a return to ﬁrst locus of attention. Cutting through can only take place against a backdrop of rightness and relevance, and these ultimately come out of a global sense of our own knowing. Such knowing presupposes that we are centred in, and connected to, the entire fabric of our knowingness. In important matters, to cut through we need to engage ourselves fully.

Sculptors sometimes say that they do not make a statue of stone, rather they remove the excess stone to reveal the statue that is waiting to appear. Thinking of sculpting in this way, we recognize that two stones, even when superﬁcially similar, will have different sculptures dormant within them. It is the job of the master sculptor to be guided by the rightness of each emerging creation within the stone, while chipping away at the pieces that mask this rightness. Much of that distracting irrelevance

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actually comes from the early phases of discerning in which we are busy differentiating and comparing. Faced with a complex issue, we may initially obscure the stark simplicity of the conclusion we reach when we eventually cut through to the core. This is particularly true of the helping relationship, in which we generally need to embrace a lot of complexity before it is possible to cut through to the heart of the matter.

However, while process of discernment may be lengthy, it does not have to be. Cutting through means decisively coming to a conclusion. Such decisiveness is not a result of discernment, but its very essence. When we are connected to our own centre, the whole process may be quick, with differentiating and comparing almost instantly yielding to certainty. Solomon did not indulge in endless deliberation; the sword of his intellect quickly cut through to separate the truthful from the lying woman.

Discerning decisions are only right at the time taken. What happens afterwards depends on how the pattern of events continues to evolve. Solomon’s decision about the way to resolve the dispute between the two women required him to put it into action immediately. When we put our decisions into action, the situation we were initially addressing may alter. If we are discerning, the gap between what we want and what is happening will alert us to the need to revisit a decision.

Discernment is thus a rational process in which we use our senses, mind, and intellect. However, cutting through touches levels of experience beyond the mind and intellect. There are dimensions to our intelligence that can compute enormous amounts of information almost instantly. In cutting through we touch a kind of knowing, to which we can say ‘yes’ with our whole being. We make a leap to a new level of certainty. We know at once that we have got to the heart of the matter, although it may take longer to explain just how and why the knowing that emerged in our discernment was spot-on.

In this somewhat transcendent dimension of discernment, we come close to the creative surprise of reﬂection. There is a connection in the moments of insight in these two processes. But whereas the general movement of reﬂection is circular, turning back on itself, discernment is forward pointing, centred, yet urgently reaching from the unknown into the known.

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DISCERNMENT AND KNOWER, KNOWING, AND KNOWN

While we were working on this chapter, a young Indonesian friend of ours reported that she had been talking to her father about the end of the Soekarno era, some thirty years previously. For many Indonesians, the fall of Soeharto meant they could open a closed chapter in their history, and connect their present with a part of their national evolution from which they had been brutally separated. She was asking many questions of the kind, ‘What was this person like?’ ‘What did he do?’ ‘What happened when…?’ Her father, a creative and discerning thinker, tried to answer her questions, but commented with some frustration: ‘I don’t like your questions!’ It was clear from the conversation that he did not mind talking about a period from before his daughter’s birth. But he felt that her questions were leading to a lot of information about the particulars of that period, without taking her towards an understanding of their deeper signiﬁcance. She was not grasping their place in the patterns that were unfolding at that time and that were still inﬂuencing the present. In effect, he felt that her questions lacked discernment

If we are discerning, any question can provide a starting point for investigation. With discernment, we quickly recognize whether our initial question is helpful. If not, discernment helps us identify better questions, until we recognize the right one. Discernment is sensitive both to the ring of rightness and to the feeling that something is being overlooked.

Discernment thus reﬁnes our ability to ask questions so that the questions we ask are really pertinent to the matter in hand. Learning how to formulate discerning questions, conversely, also develops our ability to be discerning.

Over time the scope of our discernment expands. At the same time, its quality becomes more reﬁned. Initially, we apply discernment to our immediate ﬁ eld of experience. Such discernment is content-oriented. Later, our discerning takes into account the way in which our own thinking inﬂuences what we know. Such knowing about our knowing is essential for formulating perceptive questions. Eventually, we turn our discerning also to the knower. The question: ‘Who or what is it that enables us to know what we know?’ grows in importance. When this happens, we include the full range of experience in our discerning. Then our discerning is most comprehensive and sharp.

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DISCERNMENT AND THE KNOWN

We begin to develop discernment in relation to the immediate contents of consciousness – the perception of things, people, processes, and events. Our discerning helps us evaluate and manage what comes into our ﬁ eld of experience. Such discerning can be very important. Much expertise resides in a well-developed ability to be discerning about aspects of sensory experience. A wine-taster, for instance, can be very discerning about the qualities of different types of wine, and even different vintages

of the same wine.

Object- or content-oriented discernment can also involve a mix of mind and senses. This is the case among those who are very discerning about their fellow human beings. Such people are adept at choosing friends, partners, and even employees. Others may be discerning about good investments, running a business, or managing people. Opportunities for such discernment abound in every ﬁ eld of human endeavour.

The quality of such discernment depends on our ability to handle a high level of complexity in that ﬁeld. The wine-taster, for instance, can track subtle distinctions of taste imperceptible to an untrained palate. Generally, if we can accept a rich set of differences, without pushing too hard to resolve their relationship, our discerning is likely to be more profound and accurate. To do so requires a simple clarity in our perceiving and judging so that we recognize what is truly important and what is irrelevant. Our ability to cut through to the essence presupposes that we have already assimilated and mastered a lot of complexity. We have internalized the critical rules and principles until they are operating at an essentially unconscious level.

Such unconscious mastery of the rules results from a lengthy learning process in which we internalize many pertinent patterns. We pass from a conscious awareness or handling of the rules to owning them internally. Nelson Zink and his colleague Joe Munshaw call this unconscious mastery of the patterns implicit in the context in which we ﬁnd ourselves ‘syntactic awareness’.13 For instance, we normally develop syntactic awareness of a social kind by trial and error as we learn to behave in a way that ﬁ ts with the implicit rules and expectations of the social group and culture in which we ﬁnd ourselves. Syntactic awareness does not necessarily mean

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we have a great deal of discernment about our own knowing. It primarily streamlines our handling of the known.14

At times of social, political, or economic change, wealth and power may shift rapidly, causing many people to ﬁnd themselves in an unfamiliar social environment, in which their syntactic awareness of the implicit rules and assumptions of the class in which they are now moving may be undeveloped. The ‘new rich’, for example, frequently mismatch the expectations of the ‘old rich’ who see them as vulgar or ostentatious. In post-Soviet Russia, humorists mocked the moneyed ‘new Russians’ for their ignorance and lack of discrimination. In one story, a new Russian proudly shows a friend the loud silk tie he has just acquired, proclaiming:

‘Look what I got for ﬁ ve hundred dollars’. ‘You fool,’ his friend replies, ‘I know a place where you can get the same tie for a thousand.’ In kinder terms, we could say that the new rich simply often have a low syntactic awareness of the social norms among the old rich.

Much electronic equipment today has become highly complex in its features. Often people will buy equipment with many functions they never use. The new stereo, for instance, may become an icon of our incapacity to meet its demands on our minds. The discerning buyer will purchase equipment in alignment with his or her needs and abilities. In fact, we could say that we only display discernment when there is a match between the complexity we have to deal with and the complexity we can manage.

This principle is implicit in aesthetic taste. With music, we tend to become bored listening to compositions whose patterns are either too subtle or not subtle enough for our ear. The preference for ‘pop’ or more

‘serious’ music frequently boils down to a question of the match between

the complexity of the music itself and the complexity that the listener can

entertain.

For similar reasons, we cannot always receive the fruits of someone else’s discernment. Their discerning reﬂects the complexity they are comfortable with. This needs to match our own. If they can deal with a degree of complexity beyond what we are capable of appreciating, we will be unable to absorb their meaning. Sometimes we ﬁnd we receive feedback that goes further than what we might have thought out by ourselves. But our recognition implies that our discerning is already capable of reaching that far.

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In becoming more discerning, it is not only our minds that develop, but our heart and senses become more ﬁnely tuned. As we grow, we ﬁ nd that our discerning touches not only the contents of consciousness, but how we are relating to them. Discernment begins to be applied to the process of knowing itself. Such development inevitably results from a maturing taste and sensitivity to aesthetics. Taste helps guide the process of discernment, but taste alone is inadequate. For who or what determines taste? Essentially, to have sure taste, we need taste in relation to our taste. Such taste ensures that we perceive the essence of what we are considering.

DISCERNMENT AND THE PROCESS OF KNOWING

At the time of writing, Belgium was in the throes of a scandal involving the kidnapping and abuse of children. As happens with such discoveries, the public response was one of shock and outrage, with demands that the authorities take whatever steps necessary to prevent such wickedness. Along with these expressions of indignation were the inevitable demands that the guilty parties be found and punished. These demands were so urgent that the call for justice almost became a quest for scapegoats. In this context, an article appeared in a national newspaper pointing out that sexual abuse can easily occur in a society that portrays its children as pure, angelic innocents. The article claimed that this way of thinking about children is quite recent and that it readily provokes a counterbalancing tendency in a society to violate that reductive caricature. Whether this argument is correct or not, in the emotional context in which it appeared, it was the ﬁrst time someone brought people’s attention to a larger frame in which they could begin to respond with discernment, rather than with knee-jerk accusations and aggression.

While one could argue that this journalist was offering more reﬁ ned discerning about the known, he was also inviting a shift in people’s thinking. He was not only pointing to what people needed to consider, but to how they were considering it. In effect, he was inviting people to apply their discernment to the way they were relating to the whole issue, indirectly suggesting the need for dispassion and respect for the bigger picture.

Discernment about the known may provide great skill and precision

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within a narrow ﬁeld. But it can remain bound to the context to which it is applied. This can lead to imbalances in other aspects of one’s life. Computer nerds, for instance, can be extremely discerning within their ﬁeld. They may know how to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a system in a way that would mystify anybody else. But in developing and applying their skill within the ﬁeld of computing they may neglect family and friends, or even the need to use other aspects of their minds or bodies.

When we become discerning about the process of knowing, our discernment generalizes. We begin to make comparisons between different domains of experience. We not only make ﬁne distinctions about how we are functioning in a particular area, we make comparisons with other contexts – for instance, those where we are able to learn easily and those where we have difﬁ culty.

In fact, discernment about the process of knowing grows spontaneously as we become more adept in different ﬁelds and connect them with each other. What we learn in one ﬁeld begins to infuse what we learn in another. For instance, at a senior level in sports, people may ﬁ nd it hard to improve beyond a certain limit. But researchers have found that when top skiers learn another sport with some similarities and differences to their own, such as motor cross, they begin to enjoy improvements in their original ﬁeld. One may assume that the differences between the two sports stimulate comparison of the patterns in the bodymind, which leads to a cutting across to a new level of mastery.

As our discernment develops, we become increasingly discerning about our way of discerning. We enjoy a second order discernment that is not tied to a particular context. Our minds become more ﬁ nely honed. We learn how to use our minds to enhance our minds, which we can then apply more selectively and creatively anywhere.

In becoming more conscious of how we know what we know, we become more cognizant of our underlying epistemology – the otherwise unconscious assumptions we are making about our experience. We begin to cut through our own obfuscations. We recognize the strengths and weaknesses in how we learn and in the way we think about ourselves, each other, and our world.

We become more aware of the ways in which we are inﬂ uencing our relationship with the various aspects of our lives. For instance, in our case,

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as teachers, we recognize how our attitudes towards the way we teach inﬂuence the nature and quality of our teaching. And we ﬁ nd the same true for other ﬁ elds of endeavour with which we are involved.

As we deepen our discerning about our own processes of knowing, we also come to understand and appreciate the similarities and differences we share with others. This enables us to relate to them better. We come to understand how they function and develop. We recognize how they come to be doing what they are doing and why. We become better able to read people. We understand the patterns in their lives in a way that lets us penetrate quickly to the core of their choreography. We become more insightful.

DISCERNMENT AND THE KNOWER

Some years ago, NLP co-founder John Grinder designed and conducted an interesting experiment. He asked seminar participants to work with a ‘client’ and pinpoint the key issue the person was facing. He then invited participants to identify the NLP intervention that was best matched to that issue, as well as the one that would be most ill suited. As a next step, he invited participants to enter a state in which they were completely convinced that the ill-suited approach was in fact the only and best solution. He then asked them to use the ill-suited technique, while remaining convinced of what they were doing. Invariably, provided the participants could convince themselves, the results enjoyed by the client were excellent.

This little experiment is somewhat paradoxical in its signiﬁ cance. Where people are being trained to be discerning in their analysis of the challenges their clients face, and taught carefully to match response to challenge, it appears to indicate that what you do does not matter so much. It is how you do it that counts. This surprising result ran counter to the drift of the rest of their training, where making accurate distinctions was emphasized. It encouraged people to ask questions about their presuppositions in thinking about what would work with a client. From another perspective, it takes them beyond the question of how to choose what to do. It invites them to become curious about themselves, and how they inﬂ uence what happens to themselves and others.

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Many of the newer integrative approaches to knowledge – such as systemic thinking – recognize that emphasis on the known without reference to our own process of knowing is epistemologically unsound. However, knowledge of the nature and characteristics of the knower is also necessary for our thinking to become truly discerning.

Discernment, like reﬂection, is a valuable way of developing self-knowledge. To be discerning about oneself means understanding one’s strengths, weaknesses, habits and proclivities. It means recognizing how our personal history has shaped who and what we are.

Quite naturally, as we come to know ourselves, our thinking shifts from simple self-centred linear cause-and-effect, naming and blaming, towards a dispassionate recognition of the complex patterns of which we are part.

Bateson used to remark that, ‘If one observes a system, one changes it’. Real insight into that process requires self-knowledge. Only then can we fully recognize how the different levels of our experience and our various self-identiﬁ cations both colour and create what we perceive.

If one asks oneself with discernment, ‘What do I perceive?’ the ‘what’, the ‘perceive’ and the ‘I’ are all important, though the relationship and emphasis between them may shift. For instance, ‘What do I perceive?’ and ‘What do I perceive?’ are two different questions. The emphasis in the second question shifts towards the knower, away from the known and process of knowing. At times, this may redress an incompleteness, in which the knower has been overshadowed by objects or particular kinds of internal process – such as material wealth or excessive thinking or emotion. To neglect any part of the trio of knower, knowing, and known can lead to an imbalance in our thinking, in our actions, and in the relation between them.

Unfortunately, even for many otherwise discerning people our knowledge of the knower is inevitably embroiled in our knowing. Much of what we take to be self is mixed up with the whole process of giving meaning to our experience. If our mapping of our experience of the world comes between us and the territory in which we ﬁnd ourselves, it also comes between ourselves and self-knowledge. Much of our self-knowledge is more accurately self-mapping, rather than real knowledge of the self. We confuse ourselves with the labels and conclusions we have applied

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to ourselves – a decent person, an upright citizen, a slow learner, or a lousy artist, for instance. Discernment about the knower implies becoming more aware of our foibles and fables, but, beyond that, it calls us to recognize that our names are not the thing named.

When this realization becomes a full part of our lives, we ﬁ nd that epistemology yields to ontology. Knowing about our knowing takes us beyond our labels into the freshness of immediate experience – from words into the ﬁeld of being. Through discernment we come to recognize that we are nothing that we thought we were. Discernment then takes us to the edge of what we can discern with the tools of the mind. In going further, we go beyond normal discernment. We pass beyond the mind into the pure freedom of our simple being-in-existence – we enter unknowing, knowingly. That is where our discernment can lead us, but not follow.

DISCERNMENT AND THE HELPING RELATIONSHIP

An effective coach applies discernment to determine whether the key issues facing the client are primarily to do with the known, the process of knowing, or the knower. Or in other language, is the client facing issues to do with change, learning, or growth? Any issue will involve all three, but it is important to determine which predominates. Is the client faced with a simple career choice, say, to stay with a company after a merger or to move on? Are the issues primarily focused on behavioural or contextual change? Or do the issues revolve around the client’s way of making decisions in general? Does the client need to learn some new ways of thinking or to unlearn some old habits of mind? Or is the client trying to deal with a crisis in self-conﬁdence or perhaps feeling that he is facing a major realignment in his whole being as a person? Is the issue primarily how to cope with a period of rapid personal growth?

The coach’s perspicacity is particularly important as the client may not really know what brought him or her to coaching in the ﬁrst place. What initially appears to focus on inelegant ways of communicating with colleagues may have roots in the client’s general database of assumptions about self and others. Generally, we ﬁnd that even where the presenting issues are primarily oriented towards the known or simple behavioural change, at some point in the coaching, it is necessary to touch the process

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of knowing and the deeper assumptions the client has about what is true, necessary, or possible. Behavioural issues are expressions of how the client is relating to him- or herself and to the world.

Helping the client resolve an issue at the level of the known, may not be the best service to the client, as this does not necessarily lead the client to learn what is necessary to become self-sufﬁcient in the future. For instance, in the helping relationship, we often ﬁ nd ourselves midwife to important choices that the client faces. We may help the client differentiate and compare, so that no important elements are neglected or receive too much weight. This may help the client make a good choice. However, since the best choices are those where the client is able to cut through for him- or herself, learning how to make better choices in general will help the client more, as he or she will be better equipped to make choices in the future. Learning how to make better choices needs the coach to apply discernment to the process of knowing itself.

Because the coach is not the client, he or she can often be more aware of the messages that the client is giving to the world than the client is. The coach’s perspicacity can help the client cut through in ways that he or she might not be able to alone. Provocative therapy and coaching, inspired by Frank Farrely, require an ability to cut through the crap and hold an honest mirror to the client. When this is done with a lot of presence, caring, and focus, it can be a powerful way of rapidly expanding the client’s boundaries.

In coaching, to motivate the client to break through habitual thinking and behaviour, it may be necessary to bring his or her attention forcefully to the consequences of not changing. That process, which we called

‘Nose in the shit’ or more kindly ‘Rubbing it in’, is a gift of the coach’s

discernment to the client. It is only possible where the coach has accu

rately identiﬁed the problem space. That may take considerable discern

ment and the syntactic awareness of the coach arising from his or her

experience in facilitating change, learning, and growth.

As with reﬂection, the coach’s discernment can provide a model for the client. While it is natural that our personal smokescreens make discernment about our own patterns especially challenging, not every client has well-developed discernment. Where the client repeatedly has difﬁculty in cutting through, it may be that it is precisely the skills of discernment that need to be developed.

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Discernment in the helping relationship need not be confrontational. It takes discernment on the part of coach or therapist to identify the patterns characterizing the client’s thinking and behaviour. An even ﬁ ner quality of discernment is needed to cut through to the connecting pattern, the way of organizing experience that runs through all the client’s way of being in the world, as in the process of Re·Patterning. This connecting pattern or organizing principle, as we sometimes call it, is at the root not only of the client’s presenting issues, but of his strengths and weaknesses in general. At a deep level, the organizing principle connects the process of knowing in the client to his or her sense of self. It takes a lot of skilful differentiating and comparing by both client and coach for this connecting pattern to emerge, but its appearance provides a vital turning point in the coaching. And in discovering the organizing principle, the client also learns to become more discerning about him- or herself.

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TEN

COMMITMENT

If you want to see, learn to act.

HEINZ VAN FOERSTER

INTRODUCTION

‘You must become blind, forgetful, and stupid!’ That is how one Balinese

traditional healer explained the prerequisites for the shaman’s art. Much

the same qualities are needed for the fourth Key to Personal Mastery

– commitment.

When fully committed, we can become oblivious to all else. That is a

kind of blindness. We say that ‘Love is blind’. And we become particularly

committed to what we love. Commitment can blind us to all else, except

our love.

To be fully committed requires a measure of faith or trust. Faith, too, can be blind. We accept a kind of darkness, in which we are in touch with our feelings and our inwardness.

We become forgetful, too, completely engaged in the present moment, irrespective of past or future. We are single-mindedly dedicated to what we are committed to, here and now, letting go of all else.

Being committed can thus appear quite stupid. The deeply committed

can be rigid and pig-headed. Members of religious groups and spiritual or

political sects can be very unpleasant to outsiders. Committed members

accept simplistic connections between supposed causes and effects. The

structure of their thinking may boil down to something like ‘If I do what

my teacher tells me, I will become enlightened’ or ‘If our party is elected,

our country will ﬂourish’. Such thinking is not very sophisticated, but it

can have a powerful inﬂ uence on those who think that way.

Commitment to the onlooker can thus seem unappealing. But it can also appear very attractive. For instance, there is nothing more beautiful than a child who is completely engaged in his or her play – whether it is with a puzzle, a memory game, toy soldiers, a drawing, or a Barbie doll.

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The child’s attention is purely focused on what he or she is doing. And that doing is fully aligned with the child’s attention.

Commitment has a strong connection with our values. We become committed to what is important to us, and most committed to that which is most important. Our values give a direction and clarity to our commitment; and through the latter, get expressed in deeds. We can discern more accurately what people really value from what they commit themselves to, rather than from what they say matters to them.

Commitment calls us to ‘walk our talk’. Commitment means standing up for what we believe in. In extreme cases, people can be so committed that they are willing to give their lives for something they believe in. Kamikaze pilots, religious martyrs, suicide bombers, and social and political activists, such as Jan Palach, who burned himself in the 1960s in protest at the suppression of the Prague Spring by the Soviet army, choose death rather than deviate from the principles to which they are committed. When we are willing to die for an idea, the idea has become more important than our own lives. That is how far commitment can go.

Commitment necessarily involves elimination. This can make the deeply committed reductive in their thinking and ruthless in their pursuit of a chosen aim. Pursuit of a particular result may be quite conscious and deliberate, however misguided, as in the execution of terrorist attacks. At other times the commitment may be blindly reactive, as in crimes of passion, where in the heat of emotion, a person may react violently to betrayal of trust.

If we commit ourselves fully to something signiﬁ cant, such as our career or a major social mission, we are likely to ﬁnd that our commitment consumes a lot of time and energy. To make such a commitment, we may have to eliminate many other things, even friends or cherished pastimes. Commitment often involves sacriﬁ ce. A couple who have a child readily recognize the commitment this takes and the many adjustments they have to make to honour that commitment.

Commitment requires a context. We cannot be committed in the abstract. For we are always committed to something, whether it is a person or group, a place, an activity, or an idea. Commitment is thus the Key to Personal

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Mastery most closely oriented to the known. In commitment, knower, knowing, and known converge, till they are fused in a single point of focus. This is what is meant when we talk about becoming ‘one-pointed’.

To be committed, one has to lose the process of committing in the object of commitment. For example, in writing this book, the authors were focused on its completion, rather than on the process of being committed to that goal. To become committed one has to identify so much with the object of commitment that one simply says, ‘OK, this is it’. If members of sects were more focused on the process of commitment, as opposed to the object of their commitment, they would inevitably start questioning what they were committed to. Attending to the process of commitment opens up some distance from the object of our intent. It invites a certain detachment.

Commitment thus presupposes ﬁrst locus of attention, whatever it is we choose to focus on. We need to be centred in our own ﬁeld of experience, at home in our own body, connected to our own intentions. Only in ﬁrst locus of attention can we direct our personal energy towards the maintenance of a cherished belief or the accomplishment of a task we hold to be essential. Commitment is fed by passion to which we have full access only in ﬁ rst locus.

Sometimes commitment is instant, as when people fall suddenly and deeply in love and, without further reﬂection, single-mindedly pursue the one that they have glimpsed. At other times, there may be a period preceding full commitment in which we consider the implications of what we are about to undertake – whether it is choosing a partner, making a career change, buying a house, or assuming some social responsibility.

Then, the other loci of attention can be important in helping us evaluate and select what we commit to in a discerning way. The other perspectives can help create an initial base for commitment, by ensuring that we consider what we might be about to commit to from different perspectives. The wider the base, the stronger is the foundation to our commitment. If commitment is one-pointed, taking on a commitment with full awareness of what it implies means that we are more likely to remain stable in that commitment.

Once we are committed, ﬁrst locus is the crucible of our commitment. But other loci can be used to support the realization of our aims. For

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instance, we may ﬁnd ourselves fully committed to completing a business deal and rely heavily on ﬁrst locus. However, to complete the negotiations, we may assume other perspectives to gather information and ensure that we have considered all the factors necessary for achieving our aims.

Sometimes, we can become committed to something for just a short period of time. This often happens when strangers get involved in helping to deal with the aftermath of a natural disaster or an accident, such as a train crash, or when someone risks their life to save a person who is drowning at sea or has fallen through thin ice. In such short-term commitment, we can quickly become very focused and draw on extra reserves of energy in a way that helps us rise to the occasion.

With long-term commitment, what we are committed to is not always present in the foreground of our awareness. But it is never far away and can quickly command all our ﬁerceness and intensity, if what we are committed to is threatened. This can happen in a couple, where both partners are involved in their own demanding careers. If one partner should fall seriously ill, the other’s commitment quickly comes to the fore.

In commitment performance and alignment meet. Commitment aligns our inner world for effective action. Commitment simpliﬁes, as thinking and feeling converge in our doing. This process involves three important elements: choice, drive, and surrender. Choice gives a direction to commitment,

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and drive provides passion and zest, while surrender enables us to let go of distractions and give of ourselves fully.

The synthesis of these elements is beautifully expressed in a prayer that boxer Franco Wanyama used before entering the ring, in order to put himself in the right state to ﬁ ght:

O Lord Almighty,

Here I am.

I’m going to do the job.

I put my victory into your hands;

I want you to guide me for this day.

I came to bring the victory back home,

And through your power I can do it.

Surrender provides the starting point for commitment here. This is simply expressed in the opening phrase, ‘O Lord Almighty’, in which the boxer addresses himself to that which is all-powerful and beyond his own individual self. Surrender is further emphasized, when the boxer says ‘I put my victory into your hands.’ His wording implies that he will not only offer his eventual victory to God, but surrender the actual process of achieving it. This aspect of his surrender is brought out in the last part of his prayer, ‘And through your power I can do it’. Victory involves a surrender of self, and the reliance on something that is larger than the boxer. But this is in no way passive. The boxer asks God to guide him, ‘I want you to guide me’, but he gives himself fully to the process of achieving the victory, presupposing that the extra dimension of strength and support he needs will be available.

Other expressions emphasize the boxer’s presence and choosing to be present, notably: ‘Here I am’ and ‘I am going to do the job.’ In simply coming to do the job, no wavering is possible. At the same time, this boxer is not driven, but comes with a lot of drive.

The statements ‘I’m going to do the job’ and ‘I came to bring the victory back home’ conﬁrm the steeliness of his resolve. He is not hoping for victory, but simply completing a task. He has come to bring the victory back to where it already belongs, as if no other outcome is possible.

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CHOICE

One of the functions of commitment is to enable us to achieve difﬁ cult and even impossible things. To do so, always involves a decisive choosing, whether we choose deliberately, as before undertaking a business venture, or whether we ﬁnd our choice of commitment quite spontaneous and involuntary. Then we may choose because we know that that is the only way for us to respond.

Problems arise when we ﬁnd that we are compelled to choose two lines of action that are in conﬂict with each other. For instance, we may be fully committed to our work, but ﬁnd its demands clash with our commitment to our families. It takes discernment to sort out such issues.

Discernment takes us to the threshold of commitment. It enables us to recognize the best way forward. It allows us to recognize the right course of action. But it takes commitment to assume the choice and act upon it.

Sometimes the willingness to choose actually resolves the conﬂ ict between two values. For instance, in the Bible, Abraham found himself in conﬂict between his loyalty to God and his love for his son. Eventually, he realized that having received his son as a blessing from God, he had to be willing to sacriﬁce him to the One who had given him a son in the ﬁ rst place. Having chosen to do so, Abraham found that he did not need to lose his son, after all. When we take a clear direction, particularly if we do so with discernment, conﬂicts may resolve themselves in ways we do not expect.

When we take a ﬁrm direction and align ourselves fully with it, we ﬁ nd we receive a lot of support from our context. When we are committed, we are more likely to notice what will support the realization of our intent. However, beyond that, if our commitment is clear and ﬁrm, it is not only we who become committed. The whole ﬁeld in which we ﬁ nd ourselves seems to organize itself to support our intention. We ﬁnd ourselves the beneﬁciaries of unexpected encounters and events. We receive support from unanticipated sources or we happen to be in the right place at the right time.

Choice is rarely once and for all times. Usually, we continue to reafﬁ rm what we have chosen, through conscious re-commitment and through an ongoing afﬁrmation of our choice through our actions. The commitment of a mother or father to their child means that they are willing to

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wake up to feed or comfort the baby, not just one night, but as long as is necessary, no matter how tired they become. Commitment of this kind implies constancy of choice over time.

Repetition is thus also very important for commitment. To become a master of almost any signiﬁcant skill, we must be willing to do the same things over and over again, until they become automatic and second nature. This may be quite tedious. But strong commitment to an intention carries us through the dull times.

Sometimes, if things are just too difﬁcult, whether in a relationship or in a learning task, people just ‘give up’. When they do so, they really stop choosing, and thus lose both their drive and their surrendering. They give up on having given themselves up. If we stop choosing, our drive may go somewhere else and we may stop surrendering. It is difﬁ cult to continue to surrender, if we are not choosing to do so.

DRIVE

When we feel fully committed to something or someone, we discover that we have extra resources of energy. This energy we call ‘drive’. Everyone has the experience of having that extra readiness to ‘go for something’. And when we do so, we ﬁnd we generate even more energy in the process. The drive of commitment brings with it a kind of enthusiasm that can carry us through difﬁ cult or boring times.

Commitment thus has a kind of ﬁerce purity that is whole-bodied, encompassing not only our head, but heart, and belly too. When we say that it takes guts to do something, we are describing an aspect of commitment. The belly is the seat of the kind of ﬁ re and passion that fuels our drive.

Drive is not always obviously ﬁerce and passionate, though these qualities are the source of its dynamism. For instance, the Balinese commit themselves strongly to their religion. Whether preparing for or executing a ceremony, they do so with a lot of quiet purposefulness. There may not be much fuss, but in a way they are driven to do so. It is vitally important to the Balinese, for instance, to complete the appropriate rituals after the death of someone in their immediate family, even if they wait years till they have the money to do so or sell land to free up the necessary funds. Usually, the Balinese will be very kind and polite to those who are not

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members of their religion, but show interest and respect. However, if a temple is desecrated, the full extent of their passion appears. They can be ready to kill the perpetrators without hesitation.

Drive essentially comes from within in relation to our choosing and surrendering. However, it can be stimulated by the presence or pressure of other people or by a deadline. For instance, in competitive sports, we may be stimulated by the spirit in our team, the presence of spectators, or the desire to win within a particular time frame. External pressures push a lot of people in the business world to overextend themselves.

When the stimulus to achieve comes too much from outside, we can behave in ways that may be damaging to ourselves. We may tire ourselves to the point of exhaustion. Sports injuries often result from pushing the body not only to the edge of, but beyond, its limits.

SURRENDER

When we commit to something vital to us, we can become the conduit for extraordinary energies. The word ‘enthusiasm’ according to its Greek roots suggests that we are ﬁlled with Divine energy. Choice and drive thus often involve surrendering aspects of ourselves, so that we become a channel for a source of energy, intelligence, and wisdom beyond the scope of our normal egos. Deep commitment allows us to transcend our usual limitations.

Commitment is usually to something that we consider to be not-self. Even when we are committed to our own integrity, we make a distinction between ‘we’ and ‘ourselves’ – the part of us that commits and the part that we commit to. To commit to that which is not-self takes us beyond ourselves.

To commit is thus to surrender. Any major commitment demands time, money, caring, or some other personal resource. When we commit, we dedicate ourselves to that which we consider more important than ourselves in some way. As we do so, we give up some of our preoccupation with our immediate needs and concerns. When we give ourselves to something beyond ourselves, we take a step towards reducing our self-importance. This can be very liberating.

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This freeing aspect of surrender lets us take risks and plunge into things whose outcome we do not really know. We rely on our judgement and trust that things will work out. When we do so, we feel much more alive than when we opt for safety as the ﬁ rst priority.

Ultimately, macho heroes who take excessive risks, putting their lives in danger by driving too fast, diving from high places into shallow water, and other daredevil exploits, do so to experience something of the freedom that comes with surrender. Unfortunately, such surrendering is not necessarily guided by discernment.

In myths and stories, we admire the hero for his or her commitment. The hero is willing to put himself at risk in the service of that to which he is committed. We live in an unheroic age, in which people often ﬁ nd commitment difﬁcult. We ﬁnd commitment challenging because surrender is hard for us. In Western societies, we value individual freedom highly and are wary of threats to our sense of personal selfhood.

Cynicism is common in our world. Cynicism is a way of staying on the sidelines, without engaging. Cynics will often stand to one side and look down on simple acts of surrender that ordinary people make. Cynicism is a way of not putting oneself at risk. From the sidelines, it is easy to say that everything is relative. People who think that everything is relative are unlikely to set ﬁre to themselves, or to anybody else for that matter, either literally or metaphorically.

Cynicism and charisma rarely go together in a way that is inspiring. The capacity to inspire others comes from the certainty and drive of commitment. Charisma, too, requires surrender to energies that ﬂ ow through one, lifting one’s words and deeds, in a way that speaks to the heart of others.

One of the positive things about joining a sect is that people learn to surrender. The release from the burden of self-importance is attractive. The problem with developing surrender in this way is that the self-transcendence people seek is difﬁcult to achieve from an initial weak sense of self. One needs to have a self in order to transcend it. People in sects have not necessarily developed a strong sense of personal self. Without a strong sense of personal self, they may lack self-respect and be open to exploitation and manipulation – exactly what the outsider fears. Sooner or later, the weak sense of self needs to be addressed before real surrender to life’s unfolding becomes possible.

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Giving up the self before one knows oneself is a recipe for fanaticism

– a common problem with members of sects. Paradoxically, fanatics tend to display both a weak sense of self and a lot of ego. This is not real self-transcendence, but a bolstering of the self through identiﬁ cation with something ‘larger’ but not necessarily transcending it – such as the group or an ideology. Fanaticism arises from commitment that is disconnected from reﬂection, attentiveness, and discernment. Knowing is weak and the knower is not only absorbed in the known, but lost in it.

Commitment thus both supports and is supported by the other Keys to

Personal Mastery. Commitment helps ensure that what we have reﬂ ected

on, and given our discernment and attentiveness to, bears fruit in ac

tion.

Reﬂ ection often helps us gain some creative insight pertinent to unre

solved issues in our lives. Discernment helps us decide what we need to

do, but we are not yet necessarily committed to doing. It takes commit

ment for us to become fully engaged and ready to follow through, while

attentiveness helps us remain sensitive to the various factors affecting the

realization of what we have committed to.

The nature of commitment and its connection to the other Keys to Personal Mastery is well illustrated in the third Indiana Jones ﬁ lm, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In this ﬁlm, the hero’s father is a reﬂ ective character; while the son, as well as being more adventurous, is a more discerning character. Both display a lot of attentiveness.

After numerous adventures, the hero ﬁnds himself close to discovering the Holy Grail. At ﬁrst, he does not want to ﬁnd the Grail, for fear of it falling into the hands of the Nazis. However, when his father is shot by the latter, he decides to complete his quest in order to heal his wounded father. His father’s plight stimulates and sustains his choosing. He has three tasks to complete, which he does with a lot of drive and surrendering. He has some clues from his father’s notebook, which he has to ﬁ gure out as he goes along. One clue speaks of being humble in the eyes of God. Just in time, he realizes that he must kneel and thus narrowly avoids being decapitated. Subsequently, he comes to a ravine. Here, he remembers a sentence from his father’s notebook. ‘The one who believes shall cross the abyss’. This is a moment of complete surrender. He takes a step into the void and ﬁ nds that he is supported by an invisible bridge. He enters

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a room in which there are many chalices. Now he has to discern which is the right one and drink from it. He knows that if he chooses the wrong one and drinks from it, he will die, like a Nazi ofﬁcer, who had preceded him. Thoughtfully, he wonders what kind of Grail would suit Jesus, the son of a humble carpenter. He picks a particularly simple, yet perfectly shaped cup, and drinks from it. As he does so, the old guardian of the Grail, reassures him: ‘You have chosen wisely.’ Choosing the right cup takes discernment. To drink from it takes commitment.

Much of our need for commitment in daily life does not necessarily summon the stark choices of a Hollywood movie. But the movie well illustrates some of the qualities necessary for intelligent and dynamic commitment.

COMMITMENT IN THE HELPING RELATIONSHIP

For effective coaching, it is important that the coach be committed both to the client and to the process of coaching that they undertake together. It makes a great difference to the working relationship with the client if the coach is really choosing to work with him or her, has a lot of determination for their exchange to be fruitful, and yet is also willing to surrender to what the client can teach him. It is important that the coach be willing to trust that whatever happens brings the process closer to the centre of the labyrinth. While the coach is focused with a lot of drive, he or she also needs to be receptive to the broad lines of the client’s personal journey. For instance, some coaches demonstrate their commitment by being available at key points for extra phone consultation. Or the coach may maintain some informal follow up contact to check progress after the coaching.

In the helping relationship, the facilitator will be sensitive to ways in which the client is over-committed to the detriment of other parts of his or her life. For example, the coach or therapist may notice ways in which an over-commitment to action is undermining creativity or is leading to lack of energy or health problems.

Conversely, the coach may ﬁnd that the client has difﬁ culty in making or honouring a commitment. It may be necessary in such instances to search for the underlying causes. Perhaps the client has difﬁ culty in

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choosing an area of focus. Alternatively, he or she may know where to focus, but be unable to commit energy and surrender wholeheartedly.

Sometimes issues of choice, drive, and surrender have roots in another level of development, lack of ownership of the sphere of interest, or an inability to expand boundaries or to express oneself in the world.

Often issues of trust and control have roots in early experiences, in which the client makes life-orienting generalizations about self or others and the relationship between them. It may be necessary to revisit these experiences, update the learning, and heal the presenting pattern.

In one coaching situation, a client of Peter’s, Asiz, from the Middle East, was exploring how he wanted to refocus his energies, so that his work would help support the development of others. He was a loner with a courteous way of relating. He was cordial, but always maintained an unspoken, yet unmistakeable distance. This subtle separateness had been both a strength and a limitation. He wanted more closeness, while fairly systematically pushing it away. This pattern was in conﬂ ict with his chosen direction and pathway to its fulﬁlment, which involved greater connection with others.

During his retreat, it emerged that partially buried memories of being circumcised when he was two or three years old were constraining his ability to be close to others and to trust and work with them collaboratively. At the time of the ritual, his mother had left him with an uncle and some religious ﬁgures. His father was also disturbed by the event and had gone out, too. The uncle, with whom he had been very close, appeared in a new role as assistant to the religious ﬁgures, who performed the operation with a lot of dignity and religious piety, but almost no human connecting with the little boy. It was as if suddenly all the people he loved and trusted had either abandoned or betrayed him. As a child, he decided at that point that nobody could be fully trusted and that he had to rely on himself. This set a pattern for life.

During the coaching, he released some of the emotional tension from these memories and allowed new understandings about them from a more adult perspective. He also imagined other scenarios in which he had more support from his close family. For instance, as an adult, he realized that his mother and father had not abandoned him; they had gone out because they loved him so much they could not bear to see him in pain. Imagining them staying close and being more communicative with him at

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the time of the circumcision allowed him to feel more comfortable as an adult about the past, and more open to new possibilities in his relationships in the future. The possibility of a new level of commitment through greater trust and surrender also opened up. He felt he could now ‘own’ his vision and at the same time give himself up to it.

Sometimes, the issue is not whether the client is over- or under- committed to his or her chosen ﬁeld of focus, but about whether the client is committed to the wrong things. For instance, a company’s drive to cut costs may conﬂict with safe practice. Or a manager rising through an organization may be inappropriately committed to peers and colleagues, and as a result neglect commitments to shareholders or customers.

Sometimes excessive commitment to action can mean the counterbalancing reﬂective connection with the source of inspiration within is missing. A simple commitment to take ‘time out’ on a daily or weekly basis may be enough to restore a balance offering both greater personal alignment and enhanced performance.

Often the coach or therapist will use the client’s commitment to their work together to leverage change, learning, and growth. Giving behavioural tasks to the client, as we have seen, is one way of doing this. If the facilitator selects the task with a lot of discernment, commitment to a small task can open signiﬁcant learning and support growth. This might not have been possible if the client had tried a more direct approach.

Sometimes a number of small commitments can have a huge incremental effect. Ambitious projects that appear overwhelming can become manageable, when there is trust and readiness to undertake a series of small steps in the direction of the dream. The facilitator may simply need to encourage (literally instil courage), while exacting some limited commitment to start a process with smaller, manageable steps. This process builds conﬁ dence until the client is ready to continue on his or her own.

Sometimes, the issue is not about the client’s ability to commit, but about how he or she goes about selecting what to commit to. In effect, the client may not really have difﬁculty in committing, but the process of reﬂecting and discerning in relation to what he or she chooses to throw him- or herself into may be underdeveloped. Then the real issue is how to bring the client’s commitment into balance with the other Keys to Personal Mastery.

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Susan was a bright American in her early forties. She had lived in London and parts of the Middle East, following business opportunities and personal relationships as they opened out. She realized that each time she had been at a crossroads in her life an attractive opportunity had arisen and she had thrown herself into it. For example, she had had a lot of fun opening a retail business in London in the 1980s before moving on to the next exciting prospect.

She had learnt a lot in the process, without really considering why she was doing what she was doing, nor where she was heading. Now, she felt at a loss. There were attractive opportunities on the horizon for her, but the issue was no longer ‘Should I go for this or not?’ But ‘What do I really want to go for?’ ‘What do I want to achieve in this life?’ And ‘What kind of personal legacy do I wish to leave?’

She sensed that it was time to use the skills and abilities she had haphazardly acquired on the way to create something that really added value to the lives of others. This required her to be more attentive to what she really valued in life, to where and with whom she liked to spend time, to what was the kind of context she was seeking. It required her to reﬂ ect on the mystery of what was driving her and allow a vision of what she wanted to create in her life to emerge. There was a further process of discernment to check that her vision was what she truly wanted and to establish a step-by-step pathway to its realization. In this process, commitment effectively comes last, with an engagement to begin the ﬁ rst practical steps towards the realization of that vision. This was almost the opposite of what she had done previously, as she usually committed herself impulsively and then ﬁ gured out later what she was about.

This new way of approaching life choices was accompanied by considerable hesitation as to whether she could resist the temptation to throw herself once again into the ﬁrst interesting project that came along thereby spending another few months or years, before, no doubt, returning to the same issue.

The resolution of this kind of conundrum is to a large extent entwined with the process of growth. Important patterns may take decades before they are clearly recognized as such. The recognition of the pattern is the ﬁrst step towards its realignment. Such realignment may require some readjustments in the mental programming of the client (simple changes to

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thinking patterns), a time of learning to acquire new skills, and a period of growth to settle into a new level of maturity.

It can take time for the Keys to Personal Mastery to be fully integrated and in balance with each other, so that the pattern of a lifetime can unfold optimally in all its beauty and integrity. Commitment to that process is an important part of it.

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PART V

UNFOLDING

ELEVEN

UNFOLDING IN ACTION

There is a pattern written on the wall of Nothingness.

EMERSON

UNFOLDING IN ACTION

The overall process of development, as it happens in our lives over time, we call ‘unfolding in action’. The latter phrase is ambiguous. If one accentuates ‘unfolding’, it suggests the process of evolution happening moment to moment. If one emphasizes ‘in action’, it suggests that unfolding takes place in, and through, action.

Both glosses are intended. In this world of self-interacting, self-transcending patterns, the things we observe are not so much objects, as evolving thing-processes. Our universe unfolds through what happens in it. As to us, we are beings-in-action. Through every breath we are in constant exchange with the wider world. In that exchange, the pattern of our lives unfolds, a part of the greater unfolding enfolding us. Unfolding and action imply each other on the small stage of our lives and in the wider theatre of the cosmos.

In this book, we attach great importance to inwardness and connection with subtle aspects of our own thinking. But we are not promoting inwardness for its own sake. Rather, we are highlighting the value of a well-developed range of subtle abilities to bridge inner and outer, so that our actions may be more effective and enjoyable, while supporting our evolution and that of those around us.

Such abilities, we call ‘Transcontextual Skills’ – the core abilities we need to function well in all the varied contexts of our lives. Transcontextual Skills eventually reach their full expression in the Keys to Personal Mastery. Transcontextual Skills are what help us change, learn, and grow. We have described many of these skills in the earlier sections of this book. The Way of Unfolding Compass, at the front of this chapter provides a

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summary review. For a more linear layout, see the chart ‘Transcontextual Skills and the Way of Unfolding’ at the end of this chapter.

As the full ﬂowering of Transcontextual Skills, the Keys to Personal Mastery – reﬂ ection, attentiveness, discernment, and commitment – mediate the extremes between the utter inwardness of self-reﬂ ective pure awareness and its expression through dynamic action in the world. They bring our patterning to its acme. They support our management of change, guide us towards fruitful learning, and smooth the pathway to growth.

KEYS TO PERSONAL MASTERY – A SEAMLESS INTEGRATION

We have treated the Keys to Personal Mastery as distinct abilities, but the reality is more complex. As we become more at home with them, they complement each other in an integrated way. Reﬂ ection, attentiveness,

discernment, and commitment become facets of a mature and connected way of being in the world.

Sometimes we may draw on the Keys to Personal Mastery sequentially, with the one ﬂowing into the other. Thus, attentiveness may lead to reﬂ ection, reﬂection to discernment, and discernment to commitment. But the Keys may also work together simultaneously. For instance, faced with a challenging interaction with a client, we may track what happens with a lot of attentiveness, while staying close to a reﬂective innocence, in which we are receptive to fresh responses. At the same time, we can be evaluating appropriate responses and intervening with great conviction.

The diagram ‘Unfolding in Action’ (p. 201) shows how the Keys to Personal Mastery relate to each other, bridging inwardness and action in the world. Awareness provides the quiet context for the subtle interpenetration of attentiveness, reﬂection, discernment, and commitment. Conversely, action brings to our awareness the crucial feedback stimulating reﬂection, attentiveness, and discernment in the light of our commitments.

Our openness provides the necessary context for reﬂection, a kind of presence in which we are outside our habitual modes of thought. Reﬂ ection calls us to relax in our thinking, while following some trail of thought. In the spaciousness of our awareness, we allow our attention to follow a stream of thought, until it turns back on itself in a moment of insight

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that connects the different currents of thinking to each other within our knowingness. By extension, as that reﬂ ective openness grows in us, we enjoy an increasing creative innocence in our activity as a whole.

Reﬂection presupposes attentiveness. Without attentiveness, we might not notice the enigma calling for reﬂ ection. Reﬂection is only possible when we can bring a certain caring attention to the contents of consciousness. To follow the stream of thought and be receptive to the new, we need to be patiently available. The habit of reﬂection thus helps develop attentiveness, while attentiveness supports reﬂection. Together they allow us to connect the fragmented elements of our experience, not only with each other, but with the knower, resting always in some degree of unknowing knowingness.

Our attentiveness alerts us, too, to the news of difference in our world, which inevitably requires some focusing, separating, comparing, and cutting through by our mind. It allows us to direct our attention to the unknown so that it may become known. Attentiveness is thus also a prerequisite for discernment.

It helps discernment form a bridge between our self-reﬂ ective awareness and its expression through action in the world. In discernment, it helps narrow attention exquisitely to the critical point in question, while allowing that sharp focus to remain connected to the rest of our knowing.

Attentiveness bridges reﬂecting and discerning, our inwardness and its expression in the world through commitment. It allows our discerning to penetrate our reﬂecting, and our reﬂecting to inspire our discerning. Although there is generally more discerning in our reﬂecting than there is reﬂecting in our discerning, attentiveness helps connect them. It remains present as we pass from idea to action, providing a bridge between inner awareness and expression in the world. When this happens the Keys to Personal Mastery support growth, while opening the door to a masterfulness in which we are at home wherever we are and whatever we are doing.

When this happens, we are rarely at a loss. We quickly perceive what is unfolding in the ﬁeld around us and respond appropriately. We remain connected to Self in a way that connects Self to World. All is fresh in our open attentiveness, new in our unknowing. And yet, everything is as familiar as a ripple in our own knowingness. We are at home in this

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strange world, conservatives clinging to the familiar and radicals ﬂ inging ourselves into the new.

Such integration of the Keys to Personal Mastery presupposes that we have overcome any personal obstacles to their development and are at ease with each of them. It assumes that we are at home in a way of being that places us at the centre of the compass, not so much drawn into any particular Key, as ready to shift into any modality as appropriate. Being centred in this way, present in our own awareness could be considered the ﬁfth Key to Personal Mastery. It enables us to function like a master pianist, whose hands are ready to play any kind of music on the instrument of life. Such integrated awareness alert, reﬂ ective, discerning, attentive, and committed, is the ground of excellence in any ﬁ eld.

Integration is particularly important for those involved in facilitating change, learning, and growth in others. To be a midwife to the development of mastery in others presupposes that we, too, be masters. In facilitating transformation in others, each session demands that we centre ourselves at the juncture of performance and alignment in the centre of our being. If we can rest in a base of steady awareness, we can be attentive to the client, to our relationship, and to our responses to what is happening. We can notice when something curious is present or something important is missing. We sense emerging enigmas, can gauge the consequences of potential interventions, and, when necessary, take bold positions.

UNFOLDING IN ACTION: KNOWER, KNOWING, AND KNOWN

Such integration of the Keys to Personal Mastery results from a long process of unfolding, with many steps of learning and growth on the way. In effect, what is unfolding throughout this process is the full potential of our awareness.

Awareness is unitary, but holds the seeds of diversity. It is one, but is capable of being aware of itself. It can be subject and object and the knowing that connects these. Awareness itself is subtly, one and several.

This interpenetration of unity and diversity runs through the more active levels of experience. The meta-pattern of knower, knowing, and

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known reappears unfolding itself, with its centripetal and centrifugal unifying and diversifying tendencies, in, and through, our thinking, feeling, and perceiving. In a sense it weaves the patterns of the world within the great emptiness between every atom of experience.

UNFOLDING IN ACTION

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This meta-pattern is present in the deep structure and interrelation of the Keys to Personal Mastery. We can think of these abilities as building a relationship between awareness and action in both a ‘vertical’ and a ‘horizontal’ way. Considered horizontally, as in the chart entitled ‘Transcontextual Skills and the Way of Unfolding’ (p. 214), where they are on the same row, they occupy an intermediate zone between unknowing and the known, between ‘Pure Awareness’ and ‘Living Awareness’. As a group, these abilities provide the kind of knowing to bridge knower and known.

While each of these abilities can be applied to the known, the process of knowing, or the knower, considered vertically each emphasizes an aspect of the deep structure of awareness itself. This is illustrated in the chart

‘Unfolding in Action’. Thus reﬂection is the Key to Personal Mastery most connected to the facet of knower. It is the most inward, turned reﬂ exively back on itself, connecting knower and knowing. Discernment is generally more externally oriented, bridging knowing and known. Commitment is the most active, directed primarily to engagement in the world – to the known. Attentiveness spans the range of experience from awareness to action. It interpenetrates discernment and reﬂection, providing the ﬂ exible, yet constant, knowing that permits creative reﬂection and considered commitment.

THE PATTERN OF A LIFETIME

The process of unfolding in action follows a larger pattern, over the best part of a lifetime, in which we are ﬁrst dominated by the known, eventually becoming more aware of the process of knowing, and ultimately grow in self-knowledge.

In facilitating the development of others, it is important to have some notion of this evolutionary process. There are many valuable models of development that can guide the work of the change facilitator. The model we present here considers the process of unfolding through change, learning, and growth to involve an evolving relationship among knower, knowing, and known in our consciousness.

Our personal journey through life begins with an initial separation from primary wholeness, passes through separateness and differentiation, until we return eventually to the primary wholeness, but now with our ability to differentiate.

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The story of our separation and connection is a long one, touching the whole pattern of our development. From one point of view, any sense of separation is a mistaken perception, for we can never be detached from the matrix of existence. Yet we know from experience that a feeling of separateness can be very real, at times even unbearable. Although our connectedness would seem unquestionable – we are inextricably embedded in our world, and it in us – our relationship with that connectedness shifts a great deal. In the long story of our unfolding, there is a continuing dynamic between processes that separate and processes that connect, between unity and diversity, between sameness and differences.

In reﬂecting, we separate in order to connect, while in discernment, we connect in order to separate and cut through. In attentiveness, we enjoy a state that embraces the separate and the connected, while we respond to the unfolding of their relationship. The need to separate and to connect runs deep throughout the many contexts and levels of our lives

– intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. How we bind and separate difference is crucial to our well-being, not only from moment to moment, but in our long-term relationship with the patterns of life.

In the helping relationship, a vital question is: How does the client separate and connect the important parts of his or her experience? All difﬁculties a client encounters have roots in the way he or she has connected elements of experience that need separating or separated elements of experience that need connecting.

In the following pages, we use a simple model to illustrate the deep metapattern of unfolding in action, through the self-evolving relationship of knower, knowing, and known – both in our overall longer-term development and in some of our day-to-day changing, learning, and growing.

Although everything about us is interconnected, the process of coming into this world and growing up in it precipitates a sense of separation. Hypnotic age-regression supports this view. Many people regressed to the point of conception experience a blissful unity in which all differences and separateness dissolve. This state is one of freedom and unboundedness. It is as if knower, knowing, and known are at one in undifferentiated wholeness. We could represent this wholeness as a circle or sphere:

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Typically, in trance regression, the moment of conception, as sperm and egg unite in the ﬁrst cell, is experienced as focusing and localizing this beatiﬁc wholeness, initiating its individualization. We could think of the process of conception and birth as condensing and collapsing wholeness to a point:

This point represents a fusion, or confusion, of knower, knowing, and known. The developing foetus and neonate appear to enjoy a sense of localized self, but have difﬁculty distinguishing self from non-self. The newborn baby according to object relations theory does not know where he or she ends and mother begins. Everything is fused in a ﬂux of feeling in which self and non-self are mixed up.

Little by little, the baby begins to make distinctions. As this process accelerates, these distinctions become increasingly complex and intricate. To make and manage distinctions, the child must learn to separate knowing and known, the perception of something and the thing itself. At ﬁ rst, out of sight is out of mind. As the ability to make internal representations of concrete experience develops, the child can continue to attend to something that has disappeared from view. Memory develops and with it the ability to manipulate images independent of the things they represent.

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This sorting of knowing and known occurs on many levels. The child’s intentions and feelings are recognized as belonging to him- or herself. Those of other people are recognized as belonging to them. The child develops a ﬁrst and second locus of attention. That is not to say that the old confusion is permanently ended. As adults, we can still project our feelings onto others. But we learn to confuse self and other less frequently, and to sort such confusion out when we do.

While we are developing the ability to sort the ‘how’ from the ‘what’, the knower is not absent, but mixed up in our knowing. At ﬁrst our responses

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tend to be instinctual and compulsive. The knower is still embedded in the emotional ﬂux of the bodymind.

However, sorting knowing and known furthers development of identity. As we become adept in managing our experience in the world, we not only learn, but we learn how to learn. Part of doing so involves discovering things about ourselves – notably, the nature and limits of our own capabilities. We develop descriptions or images of ourselves. We assume various pseudo or role identities that allow us to code and group our experience and take some distance from it. In effect, we develop a kind of knower, an operational self or ego, an extension of the process of separating and splitting that began with sorting knowing and known.

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With the emergence and strengthening of a co-ordinating, operational self or selves, we gain a greater ability to manage both knowing and known. We have more distance and objectivity from the contents of consciousness. We develop meta and even third loci of attention. We can monitor our experience with some dispassion. Our capacity for attentiveness unfolds.

Developing our pseudo identities allows the relationship between knowing and known to become more intimate. As what we do becomes more skilful, it becomes more automatic. For many people this may be as far as they journey. For others this merely lays the foundation for real discovery. As our abilities develop, and the skills of managing whole groups of skills grow, the relationship between knowing and known becomes increasingly intimate. We begin to have more and more knowing about our knowing. We ﬁnd that knowing and known are reﬂections of each other. We become more sensitive to pattern and the inherent recursivity of the multiple orders of existence, as well as the intrinsic reﬂ exivity of our own experience. In effect, we become more reﬂ ective, more capable of reﬂ ection.

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As we do so, we ﬁnd, we can relax our pseudo-selves and cast off our acquired roles to allow ourselves to connect more closely with a deeper sense of our own essence. The drama in our lives no longer centres on the relationship between knowing and known, but between our knowings and the knower. The question ‘What am I?’ becomes increasingly important. We ﬁnd that most of what we took to be self was in effect part of our knowing. As we penetrate the delusions and assumptions created by our own knowing, we come closer to our true selves.

Eventually, we edge closer to the patterns that perpetuate our sense of separation and we come to recognize ourselves once more as essentially that same unbounded potentiality from which we arose. We can represent this as a point within a sphere.

In a sense, there is a return to the initial state of wholeness, represented by the empty sphere, but there is a difference. We now have the capacity to make distinctions, represented by the point. This awakening to self-knowledge is beautifully illustrated in the following verses by the 17th century German poet-mystic, Angelus Silesius:

Ich weiss nicht was ich bin / ich bin nicht was ich weiss: Ein Ding und nicht ein Ding: ein Stupfchen und ein Kreis.

I know not what I am, and what I know am not: A thing and not a thing, a circle and a dot.

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Knower, knowing, and known are at once uniﬁed and differentiated. We ﬁnd ourselves capable of embracing both the centre and the circumference of life. The primordial unity is not lost, while differences abide freely within it. It is as if wholeness moves within itself and we are that wholeness in which everything occurs:

Ich bin so gross als Gott / er ist als ich so klein:

Er kann nicht uber mich / ich unter ihm nicht sein.

I am as large as God, and He as small as I;

I cannot lower be; He cannot be more high.15

We are at one with the inﬁnite. As we become fully aware of the subtle pattern which connects, we discover that we are that pattern. The pattern which connects arises, unfolds, and subsides in our own being. Our being is ultimately the connecting element to all that is. We discover that our being is not different from the being of anything else. In realizing that we are not just part of the pattern, but we are the very pattern which weaves and unweaves itself within us, then our whole relationship with it shifts. We discover that we are in effect co-creators of it. Like Swami Nisargadatta, we ﬁnd the universe arising and subsiding miraculously in our own hearts. We no longer think of ourselves as being in the world, we now recognize, experientially as well as conceptually, that the world resides in us. Gibran captures this shift in perspective eloquently in Sand and Foam:

It was but yesterday I thought myself a fragment

quivering without rhythm in the sphere of life.

Now I know that I am the sphere,

and all life in rhythmic fragments moves within me.

In losing our separateness, we can ﬁ nally relax. We give up striving. For striving can only exist where there are two. In giving up any struggling for mastery over the forces of life, paradoxically, our relationship with life becomes masterful. We begin to live creatively and enjoy the art of living.

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We could represent the whole evolutionary process as a cycle, as in the

To move through this cycle may take the best part of a lifetime. However, a form of this same cycle occurs over a shorter timeframe in the process of change, whenever we learn, and as we grow.

SEPARATING AND CONNECTING IN CHANGE, LEARNING, AND GROWTH

Learning, for instance, begins in ignorance. At worst, we begin knowing nothing, not even that there might be something to learn. We are not only ignorant, but ignorant of our ignorance. A crofter in Scotland may be unaware of the intricate skills for making the palm-leaf offerings common on the other side of the world in Bali. In relation to that which we know nothing of, knower, knowing, and known are indistinguishable. Where we do not even know that we do not know, there is as yet no knower, at least for that unknown.

As we begin to learn something new, we ﬁrst notice distinctions, to which we give meaning. We recognize that there is something to learn.

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From being ignorant of our ignorance, we realize that we do not know. This we term ‘conscious unknowingness’. We begin to pick out the rudiments, starting from the perfunctory state of our knowledge. We may have fragments of a vocabulary, but not much inkling about how to acquire more of a new language. What we are learning is not yet part of us. We may ﬁnd ourselves in a lot of confusion; the knower is easily lost in his or her early attempts to know.

The possibility of connecting the elements of what we know to each other and to ourselves eventually gives way to a state in which we proceed in a very deliberate manner. We have knowledge, but do not yet have mastery. We remain self-conscious, and tentative, like a bird that can move its wings and can take off for a while, but cannot yet ﬂ y properly. We can use the syntax of the new language with some accuracy, but we have to think about it. It does not yet roll off our tongues.

As our knowing becomes automatic, the gap between knowing and

known closes. As we become intimate with what we have been learning,

it becomes ours.

As it does so, we enjoy a ﬂuency in which we are no longer self-con

scious. Our learning becomes so much part of us that we can use it in

a natural and unassuming way. We are no longer like a new doctor self

consciously wearing the white coat and stethoscope, we are just ourselves,

naturally expressing ourselves. We can hardly remember a time when we

did not know. Our knowledge expresses itself automatically without our

getting in the way. We begin to enjoy a kind of spaciousness in which our

knowledge can simply come forward as needed.

However, should we trespass into unknown territory, we could again

ﬁnd that spaciousness collapsing in the confusion of knower, knowing,

and known.

In the four-box diagram illustrating the overall process of unfolding and the sub-processes of change, learning and growth, change is represented by a simple shift from one box to the next one. Something happens and we pass, say, from not knowing that we do not know to knowing that do not know.

Learning is suggested by a whole cycle progressing round all the boxes

– from ignorance to mastery, from unconscious unknowingness to unconscious knowingness. Growth reﬂects a shift not only in our learning, but

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in how we are learning. There is a re-alignment in the underlying pattern of relationships among knower, knowing, and known. The shift in these relationships is represented by modiﬁcations in the ﬁgures situated on the boundaries between boxes. With each important transformation in how we are learning, we grow. As we grow, we shift from one phase in our relationship with the elements of knower, knowing, and known to a new one, until we eventually return ‘home’. Unfolding, then, could be thought of as the deeper pattern taking place as we go through the whole cycle from undifferentiated wholeness back to wholeness with differences, from the empty circle back to the circle with the dot.

This evolutionary process is beautifully illustrated in the four stanzas of a poem by Theodore Roethke entitled ‘In a Dark Time’. Each stanza suggests one phase of the connecting pattern,

The opening words, which also provide the poem’s title, reﬂ ect a time of not-knowing, during which some knowing begins: ‘In a dark time, the eye begins to see.’ The phrasing here, making ‘the eye’ ‘see’, rather than

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someone in particular, suggests the initial absence of a knower and the bare beginnings of knowing:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;

I hear my echo in the echoing wood –

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren.

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den

In the beginnings of knowing, there is a continuing confusion between knowing and known. In meeting his shadow in the shade and hearing his own echo in the echoing wood, the poet suggests a kind of loss of self, in which his knowing is largely entwined with the world in which he does not yet ﬁnd himself. He knows himself only through his shadow and echo, part of his own knowing. Like a fallen angel, dimly recalling a prior wholeness, his command of the whole (‘lord of nature’) is reduced to weeping before a part – a tree. In living between the heron and the wren, the beasts of the hill and the serpents of the den, he is caught between the sublime and the mundane, the sociable and the solitary, the heights and the depths.

In the next stanza, there is a shift. Whereas the ﬁ rst stanza is effectively locked into an emerging ﬁrst locus of attention, confused with second locus, here a third locus emerges. The poet begins to generalize about his condition with some detachment:

What’s madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day’s on ﬁ re!

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.

That place among the rocks – is it a cave,

Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

Conﬂict between knower (‘nobility of soul’) and the known (‘circumstances’) is recognized as insane. Yet although the poem’s narrator touches despair, he is no longer totally immersed in it. There is another

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level of awareness (‘I know the purity of’). Between the heights and the depths, between knowing and known, he secures ‘an edge’.

In the third stanza, the poem proclaims an increasing sensitivity to pattern – ‘a steady storm of correspondences’. In the creative tension between stability and change, new insights emerge with some intensity. Opposites are reﬂected in each other. Patterns in nature reﬂ ect patterns within:

A steady storm of correspondences!A night ﬂowing with birds, a ragged moon,And in broad day the midnight come again!

As knowing and known converge, self-knowledge increases, stripping away outworn identity:

A man goes far to ﬁnd out what he is – Death of the self in a long tearless night,All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Death of the self may be discomforting, but as the old self perishes, nature is transﬁ gured.

Finally, in the last stanza, the quest for self-knowledge comes to fruition. The poem returns to the initial darkness. At ﬁrst, the poem’s narrator appears frustrated by the lesser dimensions of his identity, like ‘some heat maddened summer ﬂy’. He seeks his true self. He both longs for loss of self and is continually drawn back to it.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.My soul, like some heat maddened summer ﬂ y,Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

Finally, in a kind of surrender, he gives up, and surmounts his fear:

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.The mind enters itself, and God the mind,And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

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Knowing turns back on itself. Knowing now becomes the known (‘The mind enters itself’), and in doing so it reconnects with its own essence, as knower, the uniﬁ ed wholeness of ‘and God the mind’.

In this last phrase, there is an interesting ambiguity between the sense of God entering the mind and God being ultimately identical with it, pure Mind. This is picked up in the last verse. Where ‘one is One’, individuality is not different from universality, but no longer undifferentiated, as in the opening dark time. Now it is ‘free in the tearing wind’. Differences are contained freely within the one.

In embracing differences within the one, we connect with our core and the core of all things. We approach the silent source of the connecting pattern. In holding the whole turbulent but subtle fabric of creation, the pattern which connects must be both highly robust and extremely delicate, for that is the range of differences cradled in oneness. To approach this mystery, we begin to touch the borders of that which we can best describe as the sacred in our lives. In daring to speak of such things, as Bateson recognized, we risk going ‘where angels fear to tread’. We enter a place that is profoundly private, yet immeasurably important for our shared destiny. For in the sacred resides our recognition of our responsibility not only to ourselves, but to the greater unfolding of which we are part. The sacred, we could say, is our way of acknowledging and embracing a deep sense of a living connection with something far greater than the few kilos of ﬂ esh that make up our physical portion of the universe.

As a facilitator of change, learning, and growth in others, we are not always going to be touching the sacred and abstract in our work. However, at certain points in the client’s unfolding, such as during a period of profound revision of his or her path in life, we may ﬁnd our work centred on issues that impact the whole sense of identity.

More often, we are likely to be engaged in practical issues touching work, relationships, and personal effectiveness. But in a deep coaching there will always be some point in which we approach existential issues. In exploring the client’s patterns, we will inevitably open up the deep presuppositions that hold his or her world in place, supporting current strengths and weaknesses. If the client’s patterns are to shift, we will touch the subtle ground where performance meets alignment in the deep

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epistemological assumptions about self and world. To support change, learning, and growth, we must have some way of connecting with the larger pattern of unfolding, both cognitively through understanding and experientially. Unless we do so, we will not be able to hold the larger frame for the client within which lesser frames can be identiﬁ ed, contextualized, and readjusted.

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TWELVE

THE PATTERN WHICH CONNECTS

Und wenn ich das Irdische vergass, zu der stillen Erde sag: Ich rinne. Zu den raschen Wasser sprich: Ich bin.

And if I ever forgot the earthly,To the still earth say: I ﬂ ow.To the ﬂeet water speak: I am.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, Sonnets to Orpheus

INTRODUCTION

In the previous chapter, we considered the meta-pattern of change, learning, and growth in our lives as a whole. Here we explore how our personal evolution is connected to the larger pattern unfolding in the world about us. Alignment does not merely mean an inner coherency of the different parts of ourselves. It presupposes that our own unfolding is aligned with that of the larger pattern about us. Such alignment of self and context is the ultimate goal of personal development. It is the essence of a life well lived. Our world is also changing, learning, and growing at the collective level. In aligning ourselves with that unfolding pattern we can best fulﬁ l our possibilities, whether as quiet small-part players in the theatre of life or as one of the giants who seize the reins of time and single-handedly shift the direction of the planet as a whole.

Alignment with the connecting pattern is vital to those in the helping professions. Without a substantial realization of the goal of development by the coach or therapist, there is a risk of the blind leading the blind. We can only accompany others on a path we have ourselves travelled. Performance meets alignment in a place of personal coherency that is fully open to the world. This is as true for the coach or therapist as for the client,

Connecting with the pattern which connects involves touching realms of experience that go beyond much of what happens in the helping

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relationshi p. But it is vital that the development facilitator be capable of holding the widest possible frame for the client’s unfolding. Unless we embrace the full range of our humanity, which includes the depths of the heart and the sacred, we are likely to lack the depth of insight, wisdom, and compassion needed to accompany the client on his or her journey towards greater alignment and more effective performance. For that we need a well-developed sense of the pattern which connects and how to connect with it.

THE PATTERN WHICH CONNECTS

Our planet, spinning in the vast reaches of space, offers an enigma as old as time and as young as our species. Our world is part of a fabric of enormous complexity and diversity, yet our deepest intuitions posit an ultimate unity. At an existential level we both differentiate and we connect. We separate and we unify. Bateson’s ‘pattern which connects’ speaks of this deep characteristic of both the natural world and our own minds: dancing between similarity and difference, between diversity and unity.

The problem of how to reconcile life’s differences with its potential unity is not some abstract conundrum. It cuts to the core of the helping relationship. Ultimately, all issues in the helping relationship are variations of this: how does the client separate and connect the elements of his or her world? How does he or she handle differences in relation to life’s essential unity and connectedness? Essentially, the coach’s task is to help the client resolve the contradictions that inevitably arise in this process.

Connecting with the pattern which connects is thus not some abstract luxury for weekend mystics. It is the key to resolving at a higher logical level the conﬂicts between what has been inappropriately separated or connected by the client. That is where performance meets alignment.

In this book, we have treated pattern itself as a connecting principle. Pattern encompasses diversity while pointing towards unity. In the opening chapters, we suggested that pattern is both in the world and in us. In investigating the patterns of nature, we notice that lesser patterns are subsumed in larger ones. Ultimately, all patterns appear to participate in one large, interconnected whole.

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The connecting pattern not only links the thing-processes of the world to each other, but connects us to them. As such, we cannot simply seek the pattern which connects in the processes we observe in nature. Since all patterning abides in us and our tendency to seek the encompassing and the connecting runs so deep, we need to include ourselves in some way. As Wilber argues, descriptions of the physical world – whether they probe the vastness of the cosmic or the ﬁne fabric of the sub-atomic – remain products of the language of exteriors. Yet our own patterning bridges both interior and exterior, subjective and objective. The pattern which connects must embrace both self and world at a higher logical level.

To get a sense of the pattern which connects the world to itself and it to us, we have to go beyond both content and our coding of that content. We need to intuit something that can contain and give rise to both content and the structuring of content. Logically, it cannot be more content and process, it must transcend both. If we eschew all content and process descriptions, we edge towards something highly abstract, yet capable of enfolding every atom of the concrete. We approach a mystery, void, magniﬁcent, unnameable. We cannot embrace it fully with the intellect. For the intellect is itself part of the pattern. We can only realize it, as Franklin Merrell-Wolff argues, through direct cognition. This is the way of poets, mystics, saints, and sages, and of ordinary folks at times of poetry and insight, when the restricting habits of mind fall away for a moment, and an ‘unattended moment’ reveals the sacred splendour behind our petty preoccupations.

All we can say of this invisible and indivisible empty grandeur is that it is. Or rather that it is the ‘isness’ within all that is. And while itself does not change, it permeates and permits all that does.

BEING, BECOMING, AND LOVE

In earlier chapters, we offered a number of descriptions of the pattern which connects. We explored the connecting pattern as a multi-levelled self-unfolding relationship among knower, knowing, and known. We also introduced the meta-pattern of change, learning, growth, and unfolding as the organizing principle for the book as a whole. These descriptions reﬂect the connection of the connecting pattern to our own evolving

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consciousnes s. Another description of the connecting pattern in the opening chapters in terms of a self-evolving relationship among stability, change, and self-transcendence ﬁts well with the larger pattern running through the natural world. Here we offer a further gloss on the connecting pattern in terms that we hope bridge subjective and objective, while speaking both to the head and the heart.

When we plumb the essence of our experience of the world, reaching out for that ‘isness’, we ﬁnd running through all we encounter two apparently opposing tendencies. On the one hand, the universe is. It has been in existence far longer than we can easily imagine from the perspective of one short life. It shows no sign of imminent dissolution. Our best guess is that, whatever happens to our planet, it will continue to be for a very long time. This quality of continuity of existence, we can call ‘Being’.

At the same time, along with the apparent durability of existence, all that is, is in constant ﬂux, forever combining and recombining. This tendency towards impermanence and transformation, we can call ‘Becoming’.

Life occurs miraculously between these two apparently irreconcilable tendencies. On the one hand, everlasting continuity and, on the other, the utterly ephemeral hints of what might be. With Being alone this world of ours would be a frozen waste. Nothing would ever happen. With Becoming alone, the world would explode in an orgiastic frenzy of impossible transformation.

Somehow the tendency to Be and the tendency to Become are in such delicate balance that there is enough continuity of Being for things to occur and unfold, and enough dynamic energy for change and transformation to continue. The dance of life arises from the dynamic tension between the irrepressible creativity of existence and its inﬁ nitely patient repose in its own being. Each moment shimmers between what was and what will be, between being and coming to be.

If we identify imaginatively with this inﬁnite interweaving of Being and Becoming, we sense both enormous tension and great cohesion. It is as if the dynamic dance of Being and Becoming involves a third element binding them and supporting their fruitful unfolding. From within our imaginative identiﬁcation, we can recognize this element as a joyful, demanding, yet utterly accepting, cohesiveness. What binds Being and

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Becoming, we can sense, is pure Love. A vast ever-present Love braids the threads of what is and what can be. Love arises with, guides and sustains, their unending interaction. This Love, as Dante put it, at the end of the Divine Comedy ‘moves the sun and the other stars’.

The three facets that we have posited of the pattern which connects are aspects of an indivisible unity. Introspection suggests, no Being without Becoming and Love. No Love without Being and Becoming. No Becoming without Being and Love. Like the three musketeers, they are all for one and one for all. Our fracturing into three allows us to approach the mystery of Unity in Diversity.

This picture of the pattern which connects may not be objective, but it is human. And the subjective aspect of knowing is not to be dismissed casually. As Wilber points out, subjective claims are testable through systematic inner exploration and consensual veriﬁcation. Ultimately, both subjective and objective approaches to knowledge imply each other. All objective knowing rests on an irreducible subjective bedrock. Everything ultimately happens within the knower. Conversely, all subjective knowing reaches towards a ground to certainty. The reader can evaluate this account, by comparing and contrasting it within his or her own experience, through attentiveness, reﬂection, discernment, and commitment, and ultimately surrendering to it in pure knowing.

The question of whether the tendencies of Being, Becoming, and Love ‘really’ permeate existence in the way we suggest is misplaced. It is as

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if these primary tendencies run right through nature and ourselves, permeating the core of every atom of existence, redolent in every blooming ﬂ ower, every stone, and every face we meet.

The pattern which connects, by deﬁnition, must be unitary if it is to connect all that is. It must also contain the seeds of difference if it is to hold the possibility of pattern. The minimum differentiation for a viable system that can change, learn, and grow, is three. Two complementary and contrasting tendencies, plus a third to integrate them and give direction to unfolding. We ourselves – according to some models of the bodymind – are structured in this way. Our head provides stability (so that we do not lose our head), our bellies provide the energy seeding movement and change, and our heart bridges, mediates and modulates the two. Much of what happens in the helping relationship is an attempt to reconcile the conﬂ icting needs of head, heart, and viscera, and bring them into alignment.

Similarly, we have a left and a right side to the body. On the one hand, we are more receptive, on the other, we are more proactive. And in between, we balance these two tendencies so we may ﬁnd a way for our personal self to remain in a dynamic dance with the big world. Here again a large part of the helping relationship involves ﬁnding the centre of balance that brings the two sides into a complementary relationship in which we can be appropriately receptive and proactive in our lives.

This kind of three-in-one relationship appears in many traditions. For example, the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit also points to the connecting pattern. The Father, or what Meister Eckhart calls ‘the Godhead’ is associated with that which is beyond, outside, unmanifest and unexpressed; the Son with incarnation, manifestation, and immanence. Father and Son, respectively reﬂect the facets of Being (Jaweh; I am that I am) and Becoming. The Spirit arises from, and is expressed through, the relation between Father and Son, which Hopkins declares, is Love.

Similarly, in Bali, Brahma creates, Vishnu sustains, and Shiva renews all that is. In the Balinese eight-petal lotus mapping the relationship between the small and big worlds, Vishnu sits in the north, Brahma in the south, and Shiva in the centre. But Shiva and Vishnu are considered present in Brahma, Vishnu, and Brahma in Shiva, and Brahma and Shiva in Vishnu. All three are facets of Paramshiva, that which is beyond all

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expression. The Gods are both real and unreal. They are ways of describing and evoking facets of the Unknowable, ‘That which Is’. As one young Balinese put it, ‘Ultimately, only “That which Is”, is. There is only one moon, but the moon can be reﬂected in many places, a bowl of water or a puddle here, or a pond and a lake there.’ Descriptions like these, pointing to the pattern which connects, have provided sources of reﬂ ection and inspiration to people in many parts of the world for thousands of years.

Problems arise when the description becomes more important than what it describes. This happens when we forget that the description is only a way of alluding to what cannot be captured in words. We forget the moon and see only its reﬂections. In a sense all models are the fruit of our imagination. When we forget the origins of our models, we tend to take that fruit of the imagination as the truth itself. Then our useful ﬁ ctions become indisputable facts.

Confusion of description with what is described might be called the ‘Fundamentalist Fallacy’. Fundamentalists lose the transparency of the

description as a window to what is being described. The description be

comes an absolute, literally true. This butchers the poetry of life, strangles

the imagination, and leaves us mired in the literal and the prosaic. What

should be pointing to the pattern which connects then separates instead.

CONNECTING WITH THE PATTERN WHICH CONNECTS

To speak of ‘connecting with the pattern which connects’ is a misnomer. If, as Bateson suggests, it is pattern that connects, and everything participates in the pattern which connects, then everything is already part of the pattern – including ourselves. How and why should we seek to connect with that to which we are already connected? Any separation must be apparent rather than actual. Any connection must reveal what was always the case. That is why we speak of ‘unfolding’. To unfold is to expose in a natural way what is already fully there. The ultimate role of the development facilitator is to support the unfolding realization of this pre-existing connectedness. In that connectedness, we ﬁnd that we are naturally in alignment with ourselves, while also highly attuned to what is happening around us.

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Because the pattern which connects is by deﬁnition everywhere and in everything, we can connect with it at any time, through anything. Anything – the smell of a ﬂower, a child’s smile, even a noisy chainsaw – is a potential reminder, a call to connect, ringing through the busy details of daily life. Attentiveness to the here and now makes us available to the pattern which connects as it unfolds right where we are.

In observing the deep choreography of people’s lives, we notice that almost everybody displays a bias towards one facet of the trinity of Being, Becoming, and Love. Some people are more driven towards encountering and expressing Being in their lives. They seek stability, peace, harmony, and to be themselves. Others strive energetically to Become by doing, creating, and manifesting their potential. Still others, expressing Love, give priority to relationships with others, nature, and the Divine.

In the helping relationship, the facilitator is sensitive to how the being of the client manifests within the larger ﬁeld. The client is an expression of Love unfolding in, through, and towards Love. The unfolding relationship of client and coach is one of Love in Action – not in some sentimental sense, but as a deep qualitative expression of What Is and What Is Coming to Be through their encounter.

The coach is not only inviting the client to Be – to take his or her place in the world, where there is some doubt arising from early conditioning. The coach is also inviting the client to fulﬁl his or her potential, to Become, and to grow in Love.

Conversely, as a natural part of the helping relationship, the client also draws the coach into a deeper connection with Love. This happens automatically, without any particular intention on the part of the client. Love is the context for the unfolding of what is Becoming in and through the helping relationship. In that sense, Love is where performance and alignment meet.

The pattern which connects is particularly present in the helping relationship in the mysterious zone between coach and client. Both coach and client are expressions of the pattern which connects. What happens between them points beyond either of them personally to something mysteriously present in the space between them. That is why the helping relationship is so valuable. In the dynamic between the one attempting to change, learn, or grow

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and the one facilitating that process, the pattern which connects becomes lively. It connects coach and client, while transcending them both. When the connecting pattern is lively, so is the source of transformation, not only in the client, but also in the coach. The coach cannot be unaffected by this process. It is his or her role to be more aware of the magic of this process and to draw on it to support transformation in the client, while at the same time enjoying its effects in his or her own life. This is the gift of the client to the coach. While ﬁnding his or her way to a new level of integration, he or she is also unwittingly stimulating development in the facilitator.

The Way of Unfolding Compass as a whole provides a map of the process of unfolding towards a conscious connection with the pattern which connects. The main rings of the Compass map important stages of development. The Compass can orient the coach, helping him or her understand the client’s strengths and weaknesses, and where development may be arrested. Pinpointing where the client may be struggling on a particular branch can help the coach provide a stimulus to develop to the next level. For instance, it is quite common for people to have difﬁ culties ‘owning’ parts of their experience. Until this happens, commitment becomes difﬁcult. Noticing such a lack of ownership, the coach can help the client reconsider his or her relationship with it, and thus prepare the way for deeper levels of commitment.

The centre of the Compass represents the pattern which connects. The various branches or petals of the Compass suggest the process of development from the source within to its expression in the world. This evolutionary process is guided by the connecting pattern which continues to be present throughout the whole process of elaboration. Ultimately the centrifugal development away from the centre gives rise to a centripetal exploration of this process of manifestation. Peeling away the layers, as we seek the roots of what we are, leads to the eventual realization of the source within and its ultimate identity as the source of all that is.

The Fundamentals of Performance in the inner ring of the Compass

– inwardness, expression, direction, and connection – set the direction for development along their respective branches. These basic orientations of awareness also suggest some important ways to deepen connection with the pattern which connects.

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Traditionally, we connect through inwardness by turning the attention within and allowing mental activity to settle. This is the essence of meditative and contemplative practices. These are particularly important, as Wilber points out, for development:

Less than 2% of the adult population scores at Jane Loevinger’s two highest stages of self development (autonomous and integrated). No practice (including psychotherapy, holotropic breathwork, or NLP) has been shown to substantially increase that percentage. With one exception: studies have shown that consistent meditation practice over a several-year period increases that percentage from 2% to an astonishing 38%.

Meditative practice can thus be highly complementary to the helping relationship. Where the client practices meditation on a daily basis, progress is much faster.

Meditative and contemplative exercises help connect with the facet of Being. They stimulate the ‘Be’ part of Becoming. In contrast, forms of movement and the creative arts can support development towards greater alignment with the connecting pattern through expression. Such methods stimulate our ability to ﬂow with the process of Becoming. They cultivate spontaneity and the ability to respond ﬂexibly in life. Expressive approaches, too, are more effective when complemented with the regular practice of inwardness.

If meditation brings the awareness to the roots of the connecting pattern within, then deepening our relationships with others, with nature, and with the Divine helps us connect with the connecting pattern as it unfolds in that which we take to be Other in the world around us. Prayer, devotion, and service work in this direction. Such practices stimulate connection with the pattern which connects through Love. They narrow and eventually eliminate the chasm we create in distinguishing Self and Other.

Having a clear direction in life, one that is in alignment with one’s nature and ﬁts well with one’s context is also a valuable way of supporting a growing sense of connection with the pattern which connects. Having a deep connection with one’s sense of purpose and how it can be realized is a powerful way of bringing together the elements of Being, Becoming, and Love.

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WISDOM, BEAUTY, ECOLOGY, PASSION

Development through the various levels of change, learning, and growth displayed around the central circle of the Way of Unfolding Compass leads to a deep sense of connection with the pattern which connects.

With the fundamental elements of change – intention, attention, action, and innocence – we develop the ability to apprehend basic patterns and to set and achieve simple outcomes. We begin to function in the world, but our grasp of the latter is not particularly global.

With the capacity for multi-levelled thinking, multiple perspectives, questioning, and expanding boundaries we create the platform for a deeper kind of learning, characterized by patterning, contextualizing, wondering, and owning. We have the basis for an increasingly integrated view of the world. These capabilities underpin the higher order abilities of attentiveness, reﬂection, discernment, and commitment that support growth. Through them we grow in personal integration and develop a deep sense of connectedness with the world about us and our place in it.

Throughout this development there is an implicit teleology. The ability to take a direction gives rise to the ability to set and hold an intention, to think on different levels, and to perceive and work with complex patterns. This increasingly ﬁne use of intelligence leads eventually to that deep relationship with life’s patterning which we call wisdom.

Similarly, the quality of inwardness opens us to a simple innocence, which allows a questioning attitude to life. This gives rise to the ability to wonder about things and eventually the capacity to reﬂect deeply on them. These abilities lead to a natural sensitivity to aesthetics. Beauty is a natural expression of the connecting pattern. A growing sensitivity to beauty is an important indicator of increasing alignment with the pattern which connects.

The tendency towards connection underpins the development of attention, which connects the perceiver to the objects of perception. The ability to direct attention eventually allows us to take multiple perspectives and to situate our experience in its context. These are prerequisites for attentiveness. With attentiveness, we develop a natural sense of ecology. This guides our actions towards what is best, not merely for oneself, but for the self-whole continuum.

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The quality of expression manifests ﬁrst as the ability to execute simple actions. Through action we expand our personal boundaries. By expanding our personal boundaries what we learn becomes something we own. From a place of ownership, we can most easily commit ourselves and surrender to the creative ﬂow of life. When we do so, we unleash the passion that brings rapid fulﬁlment to our hopes and desires. This process draws us inexorably towards the ultimate freedom and fulﬁ lment of oneness with our own source.

Wisdom, beauty, ecology, passion thus not only arise from the process of unfolding, they are somehow present in it from the outset, guiding its faltering steps. They emerge in full as a culmination of the process of unfolding, just as the ﬂower that blooms is implicit in the process of growth from a seed, but is only apparent when the plant is ready for its petals to unfold. They emerge as a part of a process that begins with learning to perform well in the world and culminates in a growing insightfulness into what one truly is and our essential unity with the ﬁ eld of life as a whole.

Intention is a key factor leading to such alignment with the pattern which connects. If our intention is in some deep way to Be, to Become, and to Love, and we attend to these processes in our lives, we open the pathway to their further experience and unfolding. This reinforces our intent, which supports our further alignment with the pattern which connects. As our awareness becomes grounded in its own dynamic source, we ﬁ nd we are also automatically attending to the facets of knower, knowing, and known, without neglecting any of these elements. We experience a process of development in which changes naturally stimulate our learning and our growth. We recognize, too, that we participate in a wider stream of unfolding. When this happens, we ﬁnd ourselves open to our own beauty and to that of the world.

KNOWING THE KNOWER

Self-knowledge is the ﬁnal step in the unfolding of the curious pattern implicit in our own experiencing. If we are open, life takes us progressively from knowledge of things, to knowledge of our internal processes, and thence to knowledge of the source of that knowing and beyond that to the recognition that that source is the source of all that is.

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In knowing the knower, we transcend everything that we know to reconnect with our own source. In so doing, we end our apparent separateness. We discover, as something lived, the root of the pattern of our own life. Further insight reveals that the source of that pattern and that of life as a whole are essentially one and the same.

While accompanying such a process with another in depth is relatively rare, it is nonetheless important that the facilitator of change, learning, and growth has a good idea of where the process of development must eventually pass. Many issues that the client brings have to do with the known and the process of knowing. However, many clients face existential issues that can only be resolved by connecting with the source of the knower in the ﬁeld of awareness in which he or she appears. All problems have their roots in our acquired sense of separation from the pattern which connects. Becoming aware of our source, and its relationship to the larger ﬁ eld of which we are part, helps resolve any problem.

The ability to accompany clients, when necessary, to the edges of their relationship with their deepest self and the epistemological contradictions at the source of their problems, presupposes that the development facilitator has taken time to awaken to inner awareness, both through the practice of inwardness and through quiet investigation of the roots of his or her self.

Knowing the knower can be a slippery process. To answer the question ‘Who or what is the knower in myself?’ requires more than a quick rummage through the attic in which we store pat deﬁnitions and received answers. If we merely answer with our minds, we have not really investigated at all. We simply offer another mental construct.

Superﬁcially, of course, the knower is whatever we take him or her to be. This usually means various forms of identiﬁ cation with either the known or processes of knowing – notably, our bodies, our minds, our feelings, or our roles. But our superﬁ cial identiﬁcations generally lead to all kinds of difﬁculties. For instance, if we take ourselves to be our feelings, we are bound to our feelings. Whether enjoying or suffering, we are in a sense submerged in them.

The mask, prominent in so many cultures, always points to our obscuring the knower with our persona. It is a reminder that the persona is not the person. Whenever we rush to proclaim in answer to the question ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am me’, we are invariably pointing to a collection of habits and responses, which we call ‘me’. All these are thoughts and

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thinking. But they are not the knower. As Swami Nisargadatta suggests, we need to ‘look between the thoughts, rather than at the thoughts.’

A key question for those who would really know the knower is not ‘How can I know me?’ but ‘How can “I” know “I”?’ Since so much of what we ﬁnd is what the knower is not, the knower remains unknown and unknowable. Yet introspection catches traces of where the knower was, like a lingering perfume in an empty room. We can, if patient, release our usual habits of mind, and ﬁnd ourselves suddenly being that knowing knower. But as soon as we know it, we risk pricking the bubble of insight as we rush back to the known.

Introspection is not speculation, which is using the mirror to cast random rays, a kind of guessing, but a systematic peeling away, asking: ‘What is the knower?’ and checking the answer: ‘Is it really this?’. ‘No, then, what is it?’ These questions asked with gentle intensity leave a trail of thoughts, the debris of what we are not. Recognizing that we are not anything that we think we are takes us closer. As we approach the core of our knowing, we may catch a sense of the knower as pure ‘am-ness’ or ‘is-ness’. In an instant of subtle delight, we may leap for a moment from the hard cliff of our thinking into the mystery and freedom of our unknowableness.

TRANSCENDING ALL KNOWLEDGE

To explore the relationship between knower, knowing and known, in our own cognitive ﬁeld requires patience, persistence, and some periods where we can be quietly reﬂective, attentive, and discerning. We can simply ask:

‘What seems to be the known in my experience right now?’ Whatever presents itself is what we know in the moment, the immediate known. We can then ask: ‘How am I knowing this right now? What is the process of knowing?’ And then consider: ‘Who or what is the knower of this knowing?’ This is not an analytical or intellectual process. We are not thinking about our thinking. Rather, we are attending to our immediate experience.

Whatever answer comes to the question: ‘Who or what is the knower?’ we can go through the above process again with that answer. We can ask ourselves: ‘In what I take to be the knower, what is the known?’ For instance, if the original answer was ‘I’, we can ask: ‘What is the known in this experience of the ‘I’ right now?’ Continuing in the same vein, we

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can enquire: ‘What is the knowing in this experience?’ and again: ‘Who

or what is the knower of this knowing and known?’ This process can be

continued recursively, until it seems impossible to proceed any further.

You will notice that the known always consists of sensory experience or words. In peeling away the layers of how we are knowing this known, we become aware of a subtle consciousness-space in which all our experience occurs. As we gently continue the process of investigation, it takes us further into that consciousness-space. We pass beyond our usual knowledge. We approach, in its purity, a simple indeﬁnable being-awareness, usually

obscured by the contents of consciousness. We enter that unknowing knowingness, transcending all knowledge, within which all patterns are reﬂected, but which appears to be somehow patternless itself – the simple possibility of pattern. And while not understanding, we understand great things.

Entering knowingly into unknowing enables the relation between knower, knowing, and known to become self-transcending on every level of our lives. For in that unknowingness, knower, knowing, and known are both uniﬁed and transcended. We come to the core of the pattern that runs inevitably through all our experiencing. We ﬁnd ourselves not only abiding within the ﬁeld within which all patterns arise, change, learn, and grow, but that we are that ﬁeld itself. We ﬁnd we are not different from the great meta-pattern of Being, Becoming, and Love. We ﬁ nd ourselves unfolding in the great unfolding that is happening everywhere. We ﬁ nd that its unfolding is our unfolding, and our unfolding is its unfolding. We recognize that the pattern of our life is truly generative. We ﬁnd we are ultimately nothing but Pure Becoming and Love. We become Being-in-Love and Love-in-Being. We love all that Is, and all that is in the process of Becoming. We relax in our enjoyment of the kaleidoscopic transformations in that enormous middle ground between the unpatterned fragments of our moments of great ignorance, and the seamless unity of the great Void. Pattern plays in us, and we play in, and with, the great pattern of life.

And one is One in the tearing wind.

Such is the ultimate guiding inspiration of the helping relationship.

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AFTERWORDS

And all things are well, and all manner of things will be well.

JULIAN OF NORWICH

JAN: So, Peter, are you glad with what we have done so far in this book? PETER: Well, ﬁrst of all I’m deeply touched by the astonishing way it unfolded itself to us. I could never have dreamed how it would turn out when we started.

J: How did it unfold?

P: Surprisingly. With a lot of patience and persistence on our side, and a mind of its own from its side.Tell me, do you think the book is glad with what we have done so far in our lives?

J: Well, speaking personally, I have my doubts.

P: Why?

J: From my point of view this book is about the attempt to create and maintain an aesthetic relationship with life as a whole. When I look at my own life, I still do not enjoy a full relationship with the various aspects of life, without even mentioning the aesthetic dimension.

P: Is that really the book’s opinion or is it your own? I suspect you’re being a little hard on yourself.

J: Do I sense a starting point here for some change work?

P: Well, from my experience of you over the past ten years, your relationship with beauty is quite well established in your way of thinking, sensing, relating, reﬂ ecting, and discerning.

J: You seem to connect beauty with aesthetics. What is the same and what is different about them?

P: Beauty is a quality, and aesthetics is a process of qualifying. The quality is the same, what follows is different. In an interesting way, beauty is a ‘ﬁ rst order’ concept, aesthetics is a ‘second order’ concept.

J: Out of the one, two; out of the two, three; out of the three, four; so far so beautiful. Out of the four, the ten thousand things. That is what an aesthetic connection can do.

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P: What do you mean?

J: Well, Bateson once spoke at a conference in Michigan entitled: ‘From Childhood to Old Age’. He said: ‘What is art about, after you peel off the nonsense? The entertainment value is gone after the show is over. It was there, but it didn’t leave you anything. It is the food of depression, an addictive food of depression. You have to wait till you get to the core of the problem of pattern meets pattern to reach the notion of art.’ I love Bateson’s way of thinking.

P: What do you think he means by ‘waiting till you get to the core of the problem of pattern meets pattern’? What is the ‘core of the problem’, and how does that relate to aesthetics and beauty?

J: As you said, beauty is a ﬁrst order distinction. It describes a pattern in a qualitative way. The repetition and sameness, combined with some surprises and difference, leads to a harmonious quality of the pattern. A piece of music, a painting, a movie become an expression of such patterns.

P: So where’s the problem?

J: The problem, my friend, is blowing in the tearing wind.

P: I saw the ﬁ lm Good Will Hunting on the plane to Indonesia a while back. That’s a beautiful movie.

J: Yes, and there are some good examples of aesthetic connections in it.

P: Let me guess. The connection between the two friends had an aesthetic dimension. Chucky and Will had a great friendship. So much so that tuning into the difference between them, Chucky was able to tell Will how he hoped that, one morning, he would be gone when he stopped by to pick him up for work.

J: That is what Bateson is talking about in getting to the core of the problem of pattern meets pattern. Chucky was connected with the interplay between the two of them. Their friendship became a piece of art, an expression of the possibility for their relationship to transcend itself. You think our relationship has that quality?

P: I’m sure the book is an expression of self-transcendence in our relationship.

J: If you think back to the moment that we were sitting in the car on our way to a seminar centre in Italy . . .

P: The place was called Alcatraz, and run by Jacopo Fo, the son of the writer Dario Fo.

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J: Instead of preparing the seminar that we were to lead, we were looking for the third element that could make the relationship between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ self-transcending. What was the element we were looking for? So many words passed our minds until out of the blue, you said:

‘Love’. It was as if I received an electric shock of ﬁ ve thousand ‘Yes’s’. Being, Becoming, and Love, the trinity of evolution; put into words on the way to a seminar island, from where, according to its name, nobody could escape.

P: Yes, and perched right above a small hamlet down in the valley called House of the Devil (Casa del Diavolo), if I’m not mistaken. We tried things out on the seminar that became parts of this book, right?

J: And a lot of things happened that couldn’t become part of the book because they turned out to be quite shoddy, didn’t they?

P: Do you think we’ve been too soft in this book – giving the impression that life only consists of beauty, becoming, unfolding, being who you truly are, and all these slippery words common in New Age ﬂ uff?

J: At least we found a counterbalance by singing together that line from one of the songs in the ﬁ lm The Life of Brian: ‘’Cos life’s a piece of shit, when you think of it.’

P: So, you weren’t feeding your dog with shit, but with life, a la Monty Python?

J: And you didn’t pray to Saint Anthony when you lost your pager, but waited until someone else found it.

P: At that time Saint Anthony consulted me because he had lost himself!

J: Peter, speaking of things invisible. What colour do you think a chameleon is when it looks in the mirror?

P: Grey!

J: Why grey?

P: Because that particular chameleon thinks its is boring.

J: Being a boring person, that’s one of the biggest insults I ever received from someone whom I was very close to. I’d never thought myself boring, and there it was, staring at me right in the mirror.

P: What did you do with it?

J: First there was ‘opening to closedness’. Then the sentence was spinning around in my head and became a sort of negative mantra. After a while, the question, ‘Am I really boring?’ turned into ‘She’s really boring’!

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P: No, she’s not, I know her.

J: Yes, she is, I know her better then you do!

P: No, she’s not.

J: Yes, she is.

P: No, she is.

J: Yes, she’s not.

P: No, she is.

J: What are you saying now? I was the one who thought she was boring. You changed your mind!

P: Well, isn’t changing your mind an expression of creativity, the opposite of boredom?

J: It’s the quality of a chameleon.

P: It’s funny, but someone I was close to once accused me of being achameleon. I wasn’t boring for her. She just couldn’t pin me down, so she could never feel at peace with me.That kind of feedback is really an invitation to reﬂ ect, isn’t it?

J: This one took me a while to be able to reﬂect upon it. I was hurt in the ﬁrst place, and the feeling held me back from some introspection. Atone point I used the little format of Steve Gilligan’s to expand my selfperception so that being boring AND being creative became surprisingly interesting and boring to enjoy at the same time.

P: That’s how you learn to accept any feedback that comes your way, and accept it without having to change it, but add it to the other ideas you carry around about yourself.

J: Exactly. What happened with the feedback that I gave you about your tendency to control others?

P: I do not control others!

J: Yes, you do.

P: I won’t let you say things like that! Seriously, though if we come back to the difference between beauty and aesthetics that we talked about earlier. It was as if we were saying that beauty comes out of the relationship between knowing and known, and that aesthetics emerge inevitably from the implication of the knower in the process.

J: So, it was as if we were saying that, but we didn’t actually say it???

P: Hey, you know what I mean! Or are you trying to control me?

J: No. It is as if my knower is lost in my knowing of what I know about

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what you just said. I think we need to transcend this sentence, Bob, by just forgetting it.

P: All right, then. So, are we saying that we need to include ourselves in order to reach the aesthetic quality?

J: Yes, because there we ﬁnd the interface between subject and object,between mind and body, between men and women, between you andme. Aesthetics is part of the choreography woven into the spaces between different moves, the silences between notes or words. It was T. S. Eliot who said: ‘Only an artist looks with two eyes, and only to him the centre will appear; the still point where the dance is.’I see a question mark in the centre of your thoughts.

P: No, I just remembered what Bateson said and I was again surprised by the word ‘wait’. Why is waiting so important in the Way of Unfolding? Can you image a meeting in a restaurant between Miss Unfolding and Mister Godot? Who would fake the orgasm ﬁ rst?

J: I love to wait. If I have an appointment and the person hasn’t shown up on time, I get really excited about all those internal processes which start up. You don’t know whether you got the hour of the appointment wrong, whether the person forgot the meeting, and so on. These are the moments that I can feel how strong the temptation for knowing the unknowable is present.

P: Yes, it can become a terrible torture. Proust unfolds that one beautifully.

J: When I was 22 years old, one evening I went to a Greek restaurant in Antwerp and found myself together with a friend looking passionately at an extremely beautiful waitress. Our grilled ﬁsh became completely irrelevant, while we were experiencing the real inﬂuence of living art. After two hours of visual food, I was ready, and absolutely not ready at the same time, to ask her if she was willing to make an appointment with me. My voice was trembling like the rest of my body. Before I realized that I had said something, she responded that she would love to. My friend sat there with his mouth half open in a state of complete witnessing. I had a date next Monday evening at 7.30 in the front of the closed Greek restaurant. The time ﬂ ew like myself in the next days. I was there at 7 o’clock, I was there at 7.30, and still at 8.30. I waited until 9.15 and went home. My friend reassured me that he also heard Monday, 7.30.

P: What a pity, Jan. Did it become a life metaphor?

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J: The story is not over yet. I say this now and I said it to myself at that time. What could I do? I thought about going to the restaurant again and asking what had happened so that she hadn’t shown up that night. Of course she would have given me ten reasons why she hadn’t shown up and then maybe, out of pity and guilt agree to a new trial without error.

P: What did you come up with?

J: On Wednesday night, I went to the restaurant again. She was working as I could see from the window. I stepped in and went straight to her. Before she could even say a word I said sorry to her for completely forgetting the appointment. I asked her if she had waited long and apologised again. Her face was a little bit like my friend’s expression.

P: And did she admit that she hadn’t come either, so to speak?

J: Yes, she called it a lucky coincidence while we both laughed and made a new appointment.

P: Did she come this time?

J: Yes, and we had a lovely soiree. I even told her my strategy at the end of the evening.

P: That is certainly not the one who found you boring.

J: No, actually we never saw each other again. She went back to Portugal.

P: Really, you had that strong an effect on her? Seriously, though, you did some hocus-pocus thing, there. Would youcall this attentiveness?

J: It was goal-oriented attentiveness.

P: There was also the little lie in there. How do you feel about that?

J: You mean that I told her that I wasn’t at the appointment, but actually waited there for two hours?

P: Is that when you learned to wait? Were you pacing up and down, wearing holes in the pavement or practising the art of reﬂection so deeply that quite honestly you weren’t really there?

J: Do you think you can teach people how to wait?

P: You don’t have to teach these things. These are internal processes that anyone can do perfectly. I remember when I was young my mother took me somewhere in London and put me on a bus with a little suitcase. I didn’t really understand that I was going on a journey into the country to a boarding school. As I sat there on the top deck, waiting for the bus to go I didn’t know where, my not knowing became bigger than myself, and became quite overwhelming. I eventually had to let go of the little bit of

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wanting to know left in it, and really just sit there in my not knowing as the bus trundled out of the big city and through the countryside. I had to trust that the driver would remember where to put me down. Parents at that time mostly chose not to tell their children a lot about what would happen next, so as not to make them too worried. So there I was sitting, waiting, sitting, and waiting. The bus ﬁnally arrived and they took me to a strange new home.

J: I remember you telling that story once as a representation of an important element in the choreography of your life.

P: Yes, for years, I was travelling all around the world, with my rather bigger suitcase, and everywhere I was, I felt at home. In no time, I would leave for another part of the world. I was still performing the skill that I had learnt in that waiting on the bus, on my way to a boarding school where I didn’t know anyone. Unlike most of the other kids in that school, I always knew I had a mum somewhere. It was just weird not knowing when or where I’d see her again. I just had to wait till she came for me. If you wait long enough, waiting stops, and living resumes.

J: Does that story explain why you meditate twice every day?

P: No. It is why I don’t meditate ALL the time. The bus only comes twice a day.

J: Meditation is quite a strong passion in your life. Is that your way of stimulating unfolding in action?

P: Well, certainly, in meditating I open myself to the process of unfolding. Even in the hottest moments of my life over the past twenty-ﬁ ve years, I have taken the time to settle down, to sense something beyond my reﬂections, attentiveness, and discernment to simply be in awareness. This process takes the action out of the unfolding and allows the unfolding to act on the action. If you know what I mean!

J: You’ve been doing it for 35 years, since long before we conceived of the Way of Unfolding, so why did we open this particular bottle?

P: I’m not saying that my meditations are better or deeper with the Way of Unfolding, but many of our descriptions, insights and models are in some way the children of the processes of meditation. I’m glad they have a good home.

J: This is how it works for me: unfolding comes from allowing myself not to know in almost any context in my life. I always try to reinvent the wheel, and I love it. It helps me to stay curious and stimulates me to walk

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around wondering about life, myself, others and the relationships among them. The process of writing this book is an example of it.

P: Right, I was the one who had to put most of it on paper.

J: That is also because my English isn’t perfect. But hey, I tackled this dialogue!

P: And I’m putting it into decent English.

J: You know what I’m wondering about?

P: No, but I’m curious.

J: A couple of our examples were quite anal-oriented. Your uninvited guest, the ﬁrst gift of my son to the dog, even the counterbalancing song we were referring to earlier. Do we sniff a pattern in it?

P: Maybe there is a similarity between patterning and going to the toilet. Certainly, the pattern which connects unites the heights and the depths. Perhaps connecting with the pattern which connects requires some loosening of the ties which bind. A kind of inner ‘All Bran’. I deﬁ nitely need to ﬁ nd the ridiculous in the sublime and vice versa.

J: I read recently of a piece of research that involved calculating the amount of time a person spent on the toilet, if he or she lived to be 75 years old. It seems about two years in total are spent in the smallest room.

P: Not nearly as long as we spent writing the book.

J: Tell me, do you have a sense of how our work is going to be received?

P: I have no idea.

J: Nor do I. Perhaps copies will appear in the bathrooms of the world and the time spent on the porcelain throne will increase dramatically.

P: And an important piece of research will have to be revised. People don’t change, but their research projects do.

J: Pattern meets paper.

P: The challenge of pattern meets paper.

J: The core of the challenge of this book.

P: In a way, I’m sorry it’s over, at least for us.

J: Do you really think it’s over? It started before we began...

P. So I suppose it will ﬁ nish after we’ve ended.

J: Time to catch my plane, then.

P: Thank you, Jan.

J: Thank you, Peter.J&P: Thank you, book. J, P, & BOOK: Thank you readers.

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ENDNOTES

1 For instance, this is a working presupposition of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. 2 For instance, NLP: The New Technology of Achievement, edited by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner, William Morrow and Company, New York, 1994. 3 See Nelson Zink, The Structure of Delight, for a discussion of the modalities of attention.

4 Steve Andreas has explored this thoroughly in his book, Transforming the Self.

5 Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p. 306.

6 Indonesian makes an interesting distinction between a ‘we’ (‘kami’) in which the speaker is speaking as part of a group of people that does not include his or her interlocutors and a ‘we’ (‘kita’) which includes his or her interlocutors.

7 Reversing their place in the system – bringing the discriminating capabilities from meta to ﬁrst or the simple noticing capabilities from ﬁrst to meta, for instance – can help restore balance and improve the relationship both with oneself and with signiﬁcant others. This is the brilliant insight central to the original format for exploring different loci of attention developed by Robert Dilts and known as the ‘Metamirror’.

8 See also the philosophical writings derived from the personal experience of Franklin Merrell-Wolff, The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, New York, 1973.

9 The Prophet, pp. 36–7.

10 Mind and Nature, p. 11.

We are grateful to Mark Claerbout for unravelling the structure of embedded three-dimensional pictures.

12 The Peter Principle suggests that people are promoted for their competence at a particular level of an organization, and rise to the point at which the demands of a position exceed the capacity of their competence.

13 ‘What’s a Map?’ Anchor Point, May 1997 and ‘Elements of Syntactic Awareness’, Anchor Point, June 1997.

14 Syntactic awareness touches knowing as we become increasingly aware of the patterns and distinctions that are involved in our acquiring and extending that same syntactic awareness.

15 The Cherubic Wanderer, quoted in Jerzy Peterkiewicz, The Other Side of Silence, The Poet at the Limits of Language, OUP, London, 1970, p. 86.

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GLOSSARY

Aesthetic Thinking: A way of thinking, deciding, and knowing sensitive to, and guided by, the inherent coherence and beauty of the patterning to the patterns unfolding within and without us.

Alignment: The quality of personal integration in which the principal elements of our lives – such as mind, body, emotions, and behaviour are in accord, directed towards shared outcomes, while conﬂ icting internal demands are reconciled. The quality of being both internally coherent, and in accord with one’s context.

Awareness: Consciousness with the potential to become aware of something – including itself.

Change: Modiﬁcation of behaviour or context. Alteration in simple patterns or habits of thought or attention.

Choreography: A way of referring to the quality or qualities unfolding in a complex pattern or system, which give it its coherence and make it uniquely itself.

Epistemology: The study of how organisms and living systems think, decide, and know. The set of assumptions, beliefs, and cognitions that an organism or system has about its own knowing.

Focus of Attention: That which we attend to from a particular locus of attention.

Generative Pattern: A self-transcending set of relations among sameness and difference, stability and change.

Generative Patterning: Using our patterning abilities to transcend the limitations in our own patterns. Having a self-transcending relationship with the patterns of one’s life, so that we can not only nudge troublesome

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patterns in a positive direction, but shift the whole nature and direction of our patterning.

Growth: The process of development in which a person or organization makes a transition to a new level of functioning or integration as a whole.

Keys to Personal Mastery: The overarching abilities essential for higher levels of success and for supporting development and growth. The abilities arising from, and sustaining, the meeting of performance and alignment

– notably, attentiveness, reﬂ ection, discernment, and commitment.

Learning: Process involving the recognition of patterns and their coding (conscious or unconscious) into a model, which is applied, tested, and revised in order to support our ability to function more effectively in the world.

Locus of Attention: The spatial orientation we assume in adopting a particular perspective, point of view or ‘perceptual position’.

Model: An internal representation of the meaning or structure of a pattern; a coded crystallization of the complexities of a pattern to aid understanding and action.

Modelling: The process of studying a person or process in order to elaborate a model that will make what has been modelled more accessible to oneself or others.

Pattern: A perceptible constellation of sameness and difference that repeats in space or time.

Patterning: The perception, creation, and sorting of patterns.

Perceptual Position: A perspective or point of view within the relational ﬁeld, typically self, other, observer, ‘we’ (ﬁrst, second, third, and fourth). See also Locus of Attention.

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Performance: Action, particularly action directed towards a particular end, and its effectiveness in realizing that end.

Punctuation: The boundaries we set to mark the parameters of what we are considering.

Re·Patterning: The process in coaching of exploring the deep patterns, beliefs, and presuppositions underlying the client’s map of the world in order to identify the connecting pattern, which is at once a determining element in the client’s uniqueness and a key factor in how the client limits him- or herself. The process of resolving and transcending any implicit contradictions in these deep patterns, so that active expression in the world is centred in the ground of awareness, and performance in alignment.

Self-Transcendence: The capacity of a generative pattern to surpass itself, whether through a creative breakthrough to another level, or through participation in a higher ordering of patterning.

Transcontextual Skills: The primary aptitudes and abilities implicit in, and necessary for, our skilful responsiveness to any context.

Way of Unfolding: How things happen. A way of referring to the natural process of evolution and development over time in nature, in our societies, and in our lives.

Unfolding: The overall process of development over time as we make changes, learn, and grow.

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GLOSSARY

SELECTED READING

· Tom Andersen, (ed.), The Reﬂecting Team, Dialogues and Dialogues About the Dialogues, Norton, New York, 1991

· Steve Andreas, Transforming Your Self, Real People Press, Moab, Ut, 2002

· Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner (eds.), NLP: The New Technology of Achievement, William Morrow and Company, New York, 1994

· Gregory Bateson, Steps to An Ecology of Mind, Ballantine, New York, 1972

· Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, Dutton, New York, 1979

· Gregory Bateson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Harper Collins, New York, 1991

· Gregory Bateson and M C Bateson, Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred, Macmillan, New York, 1987

· Gerard Bodifee, Reﬂ ecties, Pelckmans, Brussels, 1989

· G Spencer-Brown, The Laws of Form, Cognizer Co., Portland, 1994

· Fritjof Capra, Turning Point, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1982

· Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, A New Scientiﬁc Understanding of Living Systems, Bantam Doubleday, New York, 1996

· Thomas G. Crane, The Heart of Coaching, FTA Press, San Diego, 2002

· Robert Dilts, Modeling with NLP, Meta Publications, Capitola, 1998

· Robert Dilts, From Coach to Awakener, Meta Publications, Capitola, CA, 2003

· Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, James Munroe and Company, Boston, 1836

· James Flaherty, Coaching – Evoking Excellence in Others, Butterworth-Heinemann, Burlington, 1999

·Heinz von Foerster, Cybernetics of Cybernetics, New York, Gordon & Breach Science, 1979

· Khalil Gibran, The Prophet, Knopf, New York, 1923

· Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam, Knopf, New York, 1926

· Stephen Gilligan, The Courage to Love, Norton, N York, 1997

· John Grinder and Richard Bandler, The Structure of Magic, Vol. 1, Science and Behavior Books, Palo Alto, 1975

·John Grinder and Judith DeLozier, Turtles All the Way Down, Metamorphous Press, Portland, OR, 1987

· Edward T Hall, Beyond Culture, Anchor Books, Garden City, New York, 1976

· James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse, Harper-Collins, New York, 1992

· Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age, Berrett-Koehler, 1999

· Eric Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe, Pergamon, New York, 1980

· Byron Katie with Stephen Mitchell, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life, Rider, London, 2002

· Bradford P Keeney, The Aesthetics of Change, Guilford Press, New York, 1983

· Bradford P Keeney, Everyday Soul: Awakening the Spirit in Daily Life, Riverhead Books,

New York, 1996 · Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order, OUP, New York, 1993

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·J A Scott Kelso, Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995

· J Krishnamurti, The Impossible Question, Arkana, Harmondsworth, 1972

· Anne Morrow Lindberg, Gift From the Sea, Hogarth, London, 1985

· Norman F Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, 1979, University of Chicago Press, Chigago, IL, 1979

· Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1980

· Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge, Shambhala, Boston, 1987

· Arnold Mindell, Sitting in the Fire, Lao Tse Press, Portland, 1995

· Arnold Mindell, Working on Yourself Alone, Arkana, Harmondsworth, 1990

·Arnold Mindell and Amy Mindell, Riding The Horse Backwards, Arkana, Harmondsworth, 1992

· Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, Piatkus, London, 1992

· Swami Nisargadatta, I Am That, Acorn Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1973

·Joseph O’Connor and John Seymour, Introducing NLP Neuro-Linguistic Programming, HarperCollins, 1993

· Mary Beth O’Neill, Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2000

· Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming, Freeman, San Francisco, 1980

· Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, Free Press, New York, 1997

· Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, Bantam, New York, 1984

· Ernest L Rossi, The Symptom Path to Enlightenment, Palisades Gateway Publishing, Los Angeles, 1996

· Anne Wilson Schaef, Living in Process: Basic Truths for Living the Path of Soul, Random House, Sydney, 1998

· Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life, Tarcher, Los Angeles, 1981

· Henryk Skolimowski, The Participatory Mind: A New Theory of Knowledge and the Universe, Arkana, Harmondsworth, 1994

·Luh Ketut Suryani and Peter Wrycza, Moksha – A New Way of Life, Bali Post, Bali, 1997

· Luh Ketut Suryani and Peter Wrycza, Living in the Spirit, Bali Post, Bali, 2003

· Paul Valery, Oeuvres, 2 vols., Pleiade, Paris, 1957–60

· Paul Valery, Cahiers, 2 vols, Pleiade, Paris, 1973–4

· Francesco Varela, ‘Not One, Not Two’, The CoEvolution Quarterly, Fall 1976, pp. 62-67

· Francesco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991

· M Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992

· Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1926

· Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things, Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont, 1991

· John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening, Shambhala, Boston and London, 20000

· Ken Wilber, Spectrum of Consciousness, Quest Books, Wheaton, Ill., 1977

· Ken Wilber, Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm, Shambhala, Boston, 1996

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SELECTED READING

· Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1996 · Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, Shambhala, Boston, 1995 · Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit, An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad, Sham

bhala, Boston, 1997

· Peter Wrycza, ‘Mirrors and Reﬂections, Mirror Imagery in the Poetry of Paul Valery and Stephane Mallarme’, MA Dissertation, University of East Anglia, 1974

· Peter Wrycza, Higher States of Consciousness and Literary Creativity, Doctoral Dissertation, University of East Anglia, 1983

· Peter Wrycza, Living Awareness, Gateway Books, Bath, 1997

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SELECTED READING

AUTHORS

Jan Ardui and Peter Wrycza, PhD are co-developers of the ‘Way of Unfolding’ approach to individual and whole-system learning and development introduced in this book. Co-founders of the Performance and Alignment Network, they are experienced coaches and trainers, who have been offering programmes in personal and professional development internationally for many years. Jan runs the European Centre for Performance and Alignment based in Antwerp, Belgium, while Peter, originally from the United Kingdom, is the founder of the Nirarta Centre for Living Awareness, in Bali, Indonesia.

For more information about coaching, seminars, and retreats inspired by the Way of Unfolding and the Way of Unfolding Compass:

JAN ARDUI

Centre for Performance and Alignment

14 Stierstraat,

Antwerp 2018,

Belgium

Tel. +32 3 235 6352

http://www.centre-nlp.com

PETER WRYCZA, PhD

Nirarta Centre for Living Awareness,

Br Tabola, Sidemen,

Karangasem, Bali 80864,

Indonesia

Tel. +62 366 24122

http://www.awareness-bali.com

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