Monthly Archives: January 2015

As Below, So Above

epiphanium

My essay, Liberating the Stars From Space & Timewhen completed. will complete the narrative concerned with how I came to necessarily etch a limit to my philosophical ability, and, in doing so, squish thousands of years of astrology into tools able to exist in my flatland.

These tools do not either make predictions or anchor person and possibility to a priori requisites. On the other hand, in future experimental philosophical research, I will attempt to show to some greater degree how these flatlander’s astro-psychological tools connect up with other over-arching concerns of mine, serendipity in adult development, the praxis of polarity and paradox, and the ‘action’ pragmatics given in the third order human/social cybernetics.

Until this essay is ready-to-roll, there’s a new page here that skates over the surface of my promethean poke, Cybernetic Liberation of Astrology.

zodiac_young_anim

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Filed under analytic(al) psychology, cultural contradictions, my research, play, psychological anthropology, psychology, self-knowledge, serendipity

The Hand

The-Hand-survey

Page 1 with two of the five questions in the short form H&HAS we’re testng right now.

 

I recommend you take your hand home and take a look at it when you get there — very quietly, almost as part of meditation. And try to catch the difference between seeing it as a base for five parts and seeing it as constructed of a tangle of relationships. Not a tangle, a pattern of the interlocking of relationships that were determinants of its growth. And if you can really manage to see the hand in terms of the epistemology that I am offering you, I think you will find that your hand is much more recognizably beautiful as a product of relationships than as a composition of countable parts. In other words, I am suggesting to you, first, that language is very deceiving, and, second, that if you begin even without much knowledge to adventure into what it would be like to look at the world with a biological epistemology, you will come into contact with the concepts that the biologists don’t look at. You will meet with beauty and ugliness. These may be real components in the world that you as a living creature live in.

…Of course natural history can be taught as a dead subject. I know that, but I believe also that perhaps the monstrous atomistic pathology at the individual level, the national level, and the international level — the pathology of wrong thinking in which we all live — can only in the end be corrected by an enormous discovery of those relations in nature that make up the beauty of nature. Gregory Bateson

This is a deceptive juxtaposition. In noting as much, I would guess almost all my given juxtapositions have an element of deception concealed in my secret intention!

plus, bonus:

Our apelike ancestors’ hands were surprisingly like ours, say scientists

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Filed under adult learning, experiential learning, Gregory Bateson, psychology, self-knowledge

Something Like a Scout

Calhoun-Educator-Role-Profile

I finally took the Kolb Educator Role Profile.

This result, schematically presented above, is fuzzily right inasmuch as the  KERP is able to capture some of the qualities of me–who in the normative sense of the term educator is not an educator–yet, is an educator-of-a-sort. What kind of sort?

This raises the question of how to get at the term for my sort. Perhaps, it’s best to ask the subjects of  whatever it is that qualifies and names what I do. I do aid experience-based transformative learning. Yet, there isn’t a clear educator’s role in what I do, except, the learning relationship is certainly educative.

Here’s my Kolb LSi 4.0 “kite.” (My own sense is that it presents–something like–my genre of experiential learning style because as a visual and musical experimenter the kites which would correspond to those contexts would look radically different.)

Calhoun-LSI-kite

In my one-on-one learning collaborations, I’m an intuitive, experienced re-worker.

Mindfulness exploits the fact that two key points of leverage in managing the unexpected are expectations and categories. People who persistently rework their categories and refine them, differentiate them, update them, and replace them notice more and catch unexpected events earlier in their development. That is the essence of mindfulness. – Karl Weick

Where is mindfulness located in the Experiential Learning Cycle of David A. Kolb?

Kolb-Model

David A. Kolb’s experiential learning cycle helps me channel my introspective sense of my role:

feelandwatchwatchingandthinkandwatchandfeelandwatchandthinkanddo

In the literature and movies of the American Frontier the scout is usually depicted as a roughly clad eccentric who leaves the safety of the settlement and reappears unpredictably, bringing a mixture of firsthand reports, rumors, and warnings about the wilderness ahead—together with a tantalizing collection of plant specimens, animal skins, and rock samples, not all of which are fool’s gold. At first the settlers find the scout’s help indispensable; but once their community begins to consolidate he becomes a figure of fun; and finally, after respectability has set in, he is a positive embarrassment. Yet their premature respectability is vulnerable. When the settlement is struck by drought, the scout’s nature lore leads the settlers to hidden springs of underground water, but once the crisis is past, respectability reemerges, and the scout is ridden out to the town line.Within the world of the American behavioral sciences, Gregory Bateson has always had the scout’s ambiguous status.

The Charm of the Scout Philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin reviewing Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Gregory Bateson) in The New York Review of Books, 1980 – also included in Rigor & Imagination: Essays from the Legacy of Gregory Bateson

It occurs to me my clearest educator’s role is instantiated as the central aspect of my self-education. Ironically, the KERP captures my autodidactic approach.

(I dislike the term coach.) I’m a bit of a guide and a scout. I told Ken, “I’m sort of a Virgil-like figure.”

Sort of a hybrid?

virgil-dante

 

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Filed under adult learning, education, experiential learning, Gregory Bateson, self-knowledge

Thank you Stan Bowman

perfectprints.com Stan Bowman, artist and giclee printer, principal of Perfect Prints, Ithaca, NY

Stan Bowman, pulling a canvas giclee of my piece “No Mind, No Problem”

I did a lot of research on giclee printers, First, I considered northeast Ohio. The most prominent such printer didn’t respond to a web inquiry via their own form. Too bad! There were several others that united around the principal of being really expensive. I looked beyond the region and encountered, what for lack of a better term, are giclee mills.

While doing all this research, I established my criteria: personal touch. I can soft proof for detail on my own Canon printer, and, I also can soft proof on the Canon imageProGraph 8400 printers Office Max have dumped in the laps of their weakly trained print center staffs. Still, it was important for me to speak with the actual printer. Although he or she was to be tasked with straightforward and technologically undemanding reproduction of my digital artwork, I knew I would have noobie questions about medium and finishing.

Stan Bowman’s one man Ithaca giclee shop came up in a google search. Everything quickly came into focus and then dropped into place. I initiated the first round of print jobs after asking him a few questions. Stan is friendly and a pro. His prices are much cheaper than the least expensive local printer. Five stars.

Stephen Calhoun, fine artist

the artist with the large giclee of King of the Mardi Gras

All this reproductive activity is focused on freeing my art work at its largest scale to land on the walls of discriminating collectors around the globe.

Art Gallery: My Naive Art

Art Laboratory Symmetry Experiments: Symmetry Hypothesis on Tumblr

 

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Teaching Cartoon: Post-Structuralism

laptop humor

From The 5th Wave Rich Tennant (1992)


fracture, fragment, fractal, fragile

Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines.

It is not a question of denying the vital importance of parents or the love attachment of children to their mothers and fathers. It is a question of knowing what the place and the function of parents are within desiring-production, rather than doing the opposite and forcing the entire interplay of desiring-machines to fit within the restricted code of Oedipus.

Guattari/Deleuze – Anti-Oedipus

Footnote, page 371, A-O

*See ail of John Cage’s work, and his book Silence (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961): “The word experimental is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown” (p. 13). And regarding the active or practical notions of decoding, of deconstruction, and of the work as a process, the
reader is referred to the excellent commentaries of Daniel Charles on Cage, “Musique et anarchie,” in Bulletin de la Societefr ancaise de philosophie, Jul)’ 1971, where there is violent anger on the part of some participants in the discussion, reacting to the idea that there is no longer any code.

Be careful!

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Having It All – Meshwork’s Ultimate Cha-Ching

Ken Wilber's cash register

Received a marketing piece from Ken Wilber:

Supermind is the epitome of freedom and responsibility. You, and in the deepest sense you alone, become responsible for the entire planet and all of its beings. Immanuel Kant beautifully defined a “cosmopolitan” as one who feels that, “when anyone anywhere suffers, I suffer” — a profound world-centric awareness. And the ultimate cosmopolitanism is when one feels that, when anyone or anything anywhere suffers, I suffer, because I am them.

Supermind is that type of all-inclusive, all-pervading, all-embracing responsibility. And it starts with being able to hold the entire Kosmos in your awareness without shutting out so much as a single item. Absolutely everything entering your field of awareness, with no exceptions whatsoever, is fully and totally embraced, saturated with love, radiating from the infinity of your own heart-space, streaming from the radical fullness of your very own being, and reaching out to each and every thing and event, in each and every direction in the known ends of the Kosmos itself. There is simply nothing anywhere, at any time, on the outside of this awareness. It is “one without a second.” And having no outside, it has no inside either, but simply is.

To contract at all in the face of this undivided wholeness awareness, this total painting of all that is existing in this timeless all-inclusive present, is to set in motion the self-contraction, the separate self-sense that latches onto the relative, finite, conventional small self — a necessary functional entity for this manifest world created by the True Self itself, along with the rest of creation — but latches onto that small self, or “I”, as if it were itself the True Self, or “I-I”, thus setting in motion the entire train of events known as ignorance, illusion, Maya, deception, the fallen world, the world of the lie. This is transmitted in each and every lower structure present, and the radically enlightened nature of Supermind becomes lost and obscured in wave after wave of avoidance.

And that avoidance rests on this, what we might call “primordial avoidance” — the very first subtle looking away. If we go back to the single, indivisible, total painting notion, there is some element, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, that for whatever reason I don’t want to look at, to be aware of, to notice, to allow into my awareness — that single, primary turning away, looking away, moving away. That primordial avoidance sets in motion the events that are, at this level, the dominant cause of the world of Maya, illusion, ignorance, deception. And every level, top to bottom, is infected with this delusion.

—Ken Wilber, Supermind and the Primordial Avoidance

FULL TRANSCRIPT AVAILABLE FOR PREMIUM MEMBERS.

I–for the life of me–cannot determine whether Ken Wilber’s desire to steward into existence the final-by-definition religion represents the apotheosis of the New Age or of Neo-Liberalism. His terrible writing style doesn’t help me figure it out.

(Alternately, I am unwilling to ante up and get my hands ‘integral dirty’; although I did so, for years.)

Consider this description of the highest level of Spiral Dynamics development:

Turquoise: A “grand unification” is possible in theory and in actuality. Sometimes involves the emergence of a new spirituality as a meshwork of all existence. Turquoise thinking uses the entire Spiral; see multiple levels of interaction; detects harmonics; the mystical forces, and the pervasive flow-states that permeate any organization. 0.1% of the population, 1% of the power. -Mark Michael Lewis

Do we know anyone who has gotten to the following optimal kosmic perch?

“And it starts with being able to hold the entire Kosmos in your awareness without shutting out so much as a single item. Absolutely everything entering your field of awareness, with no exceptions whatsoever, is fully and totally embraced, saturated with love, radiating from the infinity of your own heart-space, streaming from the radical fullness of your very own being”

This also strikes me as being a ripe example of the PRE/TRANS fallacy. Plus: there’s a total erasure of irony!

from Craig Thompson's Space Dumplins (used without permission)

from Craig Thompson’s Space Dumplins (used without permission)

Is Ken Wilber thinking about his assets and retirement? Certainly, if you wish to develop to become a part of this different kind of elite one percent, it will cost you.

Order-right-now

(I added the pitch for the free app because I couldn’t help but think of a TV infomercial.)

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Heaven & Hell & ‘Showing’ Generative Metaphysics

4square-metaphysics-1

My and Ken’s Heaven and Hell Mandala format provides a fine format for juxtaposing generalizations, or first order conceptual classes, or just about anything which can be brought into relations.

4square-metaphysics-2
In these examples the heavenly quadrant represents where the pairing and tension is heavenly, or hellish for me. The combination of foreordained supra-natural, or supernatural, is hellish for me to deeply think about.

4square-metaphysics-3
The foreordained natural monism is another conception of mechanical determinism.

4square-metaphysics-Bateson-Set-2
Here I’ve superimposed markers for analysis, and, identified orders using the terms of the Reduced Bateson Set.

Betwixt tautology and creative heuristics, contrary to the suggestion of the marker, creative heuristics resolves toward unity. Why? Because any such heuristics are only, merely, the instantiation of the deterministic mechanics.

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Filed under experiential learning, Kenneth Warren

Justified Rides Off

http://youtu.be/uIqDKhWmP3k

Justified, FX channel, is my favorite TV show. It satisfies a simple prejudice: I have long loved the writing of the brilliantElmore Leonard. The show’s protagonist, Raylan Givens, was created by Leonard.

threeraylanbooks

You got to know Leonard fairly well before he passed away, right? Do you feel like spending a lot of time with him helped you get a sense of who Raylan was?
All the good things about Raylan — they came directly from Elmore. You mentioned the old-fashioned manners and the stoic hero thing, but the thing about Raylan that people really responded to, if I had to guess, was that he seemed effortlessly cool. And that’s Elmore Leonard to a tee. The guy was genuinely cool. It was never a pose with him. You can go into any party or public gathering, and you’ll see lots of people trying to act cool, and then there’s always one person off in the corner, not doing much, who’s the real deal. That was Elmore. (Rolling Stone interview with Timothy Olyphant)

Leonard was so tickled by Olyphant’s characterization, and they became friends, he revived his own character for a fourth story.

Raylan

The show is very violent. It also is sweet too. It often is very funny. It features as a supporting co-star, maybe among the handful of this generation’s greatest tv character actors, Walton Coggins. He plays the villainous foil to Olyphant’s US Marshall, Raylan Givens. The show benefits from its terrific consistency of writing and acting. Those two strengths have even carried it through entire streaks of plotting miscues.

http://youtu.be/0ZdhGh_2pSk

Season Six | Justified Wiki

Timothy Olyphant is either famously charming, or, as Natalie Zea, Raylan’s estranged wife on Justified, has blurted out, “a dick.”

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Music – a year, a very good year

Wus

The greatest rock band of 2014, Wussy.

Hoon the Muso has posted a series of blog articles highlighting some of the music that brought him pleasure and provocation in 2014. the series of posts, the so-called yearly recap

I have several alter-egos. These other meez each serve a purpose.

music.

Kamelmauz : my creative counterpart invested in and dedicated to doing sonic or musical experiments utilizing ears, steel guitars, synthesizers, odd instruments, percussion.

Kamelmauz put out a recording last year, his seventh. It consists of odds and ends from 2010-2014.

Hoon the Muso : coming from my high school nickname, Hoon #2, then from 1971-1992, Hoon. Hoon the Muso was the record store, and music biz close confidante, and radio broadcaster, engagements that ate up chapters from 1970-1974, 1976-1987, 1995-2000. This morphs into Hoon the Muso, ace record collector and colleague of the last muso circle with Dusenbury and Dr. Bill.

Dub Collision: compiler of cassette and compact disc compilations–starting in 1976.

oh, yeah. . .

polymath or dilletante, charlatan or simpleton?

Dr.Puck : thanks to Ken, my post-professional and faux-academic pretensions, mercurial personality, promethean aspirations, and counter-cultural background are nicely summed by this naming, one that comes in handy in meta-logues, for which Dr.Puck is interlocutor, and, for blog commenting.

 

 

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Dream Remix: The Dive

Nasruddin-Dream

Week before last I had a marvelous dream. It was the first dream about my being in the Community of Practice of Experiential Learning practitioners. In the dream, several colleagues were personified as dream characters. The dream seemed to wrestle on my behalf with some fairly charged psychological aspects of my involvement over the past year and a half.

Because of the concrete personifications, I can’t offer as I usually do the unfettered dream. I have come up with an alternative that doesn’t replay the dream as much as recontextualize and remix it while versioning it as a tale about the wise fool of Middle Eastern folklore, Nasruddin. There was no donkey in the actual dream.

***

The Dive

Nasruddin had been asked to present his “Theory of Yin & Yang” to a group of eager students.

Nasruddin, standing in front of the group, waits for the cue to begin his presentation. But, something is wrong. His donkey has not arrived with important books and materials.

A student raises her hand, and interrupts to tell Nasruddin:

“Sir, we’ve already been talking about this because your donkey was last seen walking around the reflective pool by the museum.”

Nasruddin asks her, “Did the donkey have the books?”

“Yes, the donkey had the books. But, I know the donkey will be late too because she got half way around the pond, stopped, and dove right in and made a bee line toward pure experience.

NAsruddin is taken back and starts to feel confused. But, at that moment, the donkey walks in, dry, and happy to see Nasruddin.

The donkey walks up to Nasruddin.

He leans over and whispers to the donkey “Did you really dive in?”

The donkey shakes her head, “No.”

Nasruddin asks her, “Do you have the books?”

The donkey whispers back, “What books?”

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Filed under adult learning, analytic(al) psychology, self-knowledge

The Fate of Public Libraries

LIBRARIES-DSC03523

The fate of public libraries is unknown. However, perhaps a random delivery from the Cube-O-Probe set to the Heaven & Hell four square format could induce compelling intuitions and predictive  abductions.

This capture might benefit from facilitation.

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Filed under experiential learning, Libraries & Librarianship, my research, serendipity

Maybe (Teaching Story)

Sun-Chariot-Lunar

“Maybe”

Once upon a time a peasant had a horse. This horse ran away,so the peasant’s neighbors came to console him for his bad luck. He answered: “Maybe”.

The day after the horse came back, leading 6 wild horses with it. The neighbors came to congratulate him on such good luck. The peasant said: “Maybe”.

The day after, his son tried to saddle and ride on one of the wild horses, but he fell down and broke his leg. Once again the neighbors came to share that misfortune. The peasant said: “Maybe”.

The day after, soldiers came to conscript the youth of the village, but the peasant’s son was not chosen because of his broken leg. When the neighbors came to congratulate, the peasant said again :”May be”.

(Huai Nan Tzu)

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Filed under experiential learning, serendipity

Illich On Water

Ray Winslow: Illich was deeply opposed to being recorded, on audio tape or film. “Modern-day pornography,” he called it. But yes, we are lucky to have this short clip of such an extraordinary thinker and human being.

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Filed under education, history, psychological anthropology

Confessions With Becker & Fagan

http://youtu.be/dimyNC1BytY

Forgive the snake handler for not knowing the distinction between Steely Dan and Duke Ellington.

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Filed under creative captures, music

Marketing, Zeitgeist, Jargon, and maybe something like post-irony

http://youtu.be/XqskrMGeH0c

Where’s Walter Benjamin when you need him?

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Filed under cultural contradictions, technology

Happy New Year

no change

The Wave

There are things we can change and others not:
Let us accept what is our written fate.
In God’s Compassion we will find no spot;
And we should know that Being’s inmost sound Is sheer Beatitude.

And faith will wait; For faith means patience.
Happy is the man Who Mercy’s Mystery and way has found —
Who with his love and in his very core
Becomes a Wave that leads to Allah’s Shore.

-Frithjof Schuon

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Filed under adult learning, self-knowledge, sufism