the guru illusion (yeh guruwuru kya hai yaar?)

I am increasingly feeling myself anti-guru - at least in the traditional sense. Some great posts from Mushin who deconstructed his own guru role helped strengthen this feeling in me - although it has been there for quite some time (this is one example). More recently, I was chatting to someone about Baba Asharam Dev here in India who has been implicated in the killing of a child in his ashram as a way of building up religious fervour... Now, this guy has a massive following and loads of money. But why do people place their faith in some distant bearded figure whose words and actions could well have nothing to do with each other!?

The idea that emancipation is possible through one of these bearded fellows who sits on a pedastal is bullshit. Until we learn to realise that God (for want of a better word) exists within ourselves and all those around us, we will spend our lives sitting in the shadow of obscure religious figures whose real nature is as elusive as the very truth we are searching for. What we need is an alternative model for guru. One that ties in more deeply to the social reality that we are confronted with in the present age: loss of community, fragmentation, competitive individualism and the spate of horrors that this brings with it. We need a new conception of guru that embodies collective, distributed wisdom that can transport us to higher levels of collective being.

One simple way of approaching this is to look for the truth in the people who share our immediate circle: one's partner, one's children, one's neighbours, one's community. Can we see the truth in each person? Can one see the wisdom and teaching that each carries? Can we embrace our total lived experience as the guru, seeking the truth, the love, the wisdom or the lesson that can transport us higher in everything around us?

As Lao Tse puts it: "...the good teach the bad/ and the bad are lessons for the good". There is nothing that carries no teaching.

To do this requires the greatest of all powers: having an open heart. Can I have space in my heart for the other? Can I embrace the unknown? Can I let go? Can I dissolve all my boundaries? Can you do it with me?

Let us speak openly and from the heart about things that matter to us. Let us reach out to those who are least heard and let each other into our hearts and let this be the foundation of our families, our communities, our work places and our societies. Then let the guru emerge from our collective interactions and let that be our guide for the future.

What need is there to give more advice than this? Surely the rest will follow from the process!

on complexity, chaos and self-organisation

Just the other day, I was reading a post by Dave Snowden on management vs. self-organisation that triggered a few questions in my mind... This is what I commented:

chaos and anarchy are not the same thing at all. anarchy would imply not having any ruler but this does not mean chaos since a group can be self-governing and leadership a dynamic and distributed process... take for example the classical example of a jazz quartet doing improvisation (would it mean anything to say that the underlying form of the music manages the player's interactions)? now, can the same thing be said of management? can a system be said to display self-management or self-organising properties?

i often come up across this question in the context of my work... is it about the coordinator 'coordinating' the team or is it about there being 'coordination' within the team and does thinking about it differently lead to different ways of trying to achieve the end result (i.e. a team operating with a high level of coordination or coherence)?

For some reason, I also thought that self-organisation was supposed to be a property of complex, not chaotic (= lacking any organisation or coherence) systems... tipping a system into a chaotic state may be a way of temporarily unlocking the system so that it has greater chance of self-organising in new ways (this would also be where the role of the 'manager' comes in - creating the container/parameters within which all this can happen)... It's also worth pointing out that self-organising does not mean 'good'.

I also think that you can call it management if you prefer the horse analogy but there can be many other words for it... one, possibly more appropriate one - given all the connotations - might be facilitation... but then perhaps there is a scale from command and control (absolute micro-management) to not doing anything at all (with facilitation somewhere more towards not doing anything)?

but what I understood from what I have read, practiced and reflected on of systems theory is that the whole point is that regardless of what you are doing in the system (i'm talking about an organisational -i.e. complex - system here), the system has its own complex dynamics, attractors, etc. - which leads to self-organisation (which could be good or bad)... so, like you said (but in different words?), the manager has to work with the self-organising characteristics of a complex system in order to help it continuously transition to levels which secure it a better fit with more of its external environment... in a social (human organisational) system, this would entail communication and quite possibly involving the whole system in the management of itself...

for some reason this always gets me thinking about the fact that little organisms had a big hand in making our atmosphere into something breathable... and plants which continue to play a critical role in regulating the earthly climate...

sorry for the rambling! does this make any sense?