Mar 7, 2024 | TBT- Throwback Thursday
Eight years ago today, my daughter Kahlia and I were in Moscow, Russia, for a meeting and conference of Global Education Futures (GEF). It was a wonderful experience, not the least because we shared the adventure, both as tourists and as independent presenters at the event. Indeed, it was the first time Kahlia spoke to an audience of over 500 people, presenting the results of a research study that she had conducted in the US and Argentina, comparing student responses to questions of what kind of education they foresaw, and desired to foresee, in the medium to long-term future. Out of this experience came a paper we co-authored, though Kahlia was the primary author. The paper was called “A Whole Systems Approach to Education Redesign: A Case Study on the Need for Inter-Generational Perspectives and Inclusion.”
This was an experience of syntony at work as we explored and experienced life at play. Eight years ago… and the play of life carries us on with syntony and spark.
Mar 6, 2024 | Key Quotes
Nature is full of contradictions. Just look at the giraffe, for crying out loud!! What a lovely ensemble of elegance and awkwardness, of practicality (for reaching leaves in trees) and impracticality (for drinking at a waterholes). There is a syntony in this dance of improbability and possibility, of fantasy and actuality. Were nature to consist of only highly coherent beings and processes, we would be surrounded by a narrow spectrum of highly efficient but quite unimaginative expressions of life — boring, useful, and not much fun. Instead, nature dances … and is full of humor!
And that’s the fun of contradictions. They are healthy, provided one doesn’t take them too far… but that goes for just about anything, including eating fruit or taking medicine. An excess of anything is, well, excessive. But to change one’s mind, to sense something differently, to feel that something has changed … this is necessary for evolution to take place. After all, if nothing changes, you’re as good as dead.
Nevertheless, it is important to distinguish between contradiction and hypocrisy. Contradictions are fine (within limits, as mentioned); hypocrisies are not. While a contradiction involves the opposition of contrasting elements that often appear to cancel each other out, a hypocrisy involves knowing and willful deception through the premeditated presentation of one thing as something else. That ain’t good, no matter how you slice it. Contradictions are usually innocent and inoffensive, whereas hypocrisies almost always aren’t.
David Zindell, in his wonderful science fiction book The Broken God, writes of how “One can never become multiplex if afraid of paradox or enslaved by the god of consistency. Multiplex vision is paradoxical vision, new logics, the sudden completion of startling patterns” (Zindell, David. The Broken God. Bantam, 1994. Pp. 112). I think Walt Whitman would agree.
Feb 17, 2024 | Humaning
This event was amazing.
From Friday 9 through Sunday 11 February 2024, right when the Year of the Dragon began on the 10th, the Awakening to Humanity’s Sacred Mission Symposium took place. We had over 2400 people register from 86 countries with dozens of organizations and over 50 Keynote Speakers and Keynote Listeners. At any given moment over the three days, between 160 and 300 people were in the Zoomroom and many more participated via the livestreamed sessions. A truly amazing event just for the sheer magnitude of it!
But what made it really stand out was the way it danced. The whole event danced, and everyone in it, from Visionary Speakers to Space Holding Meditators to Movement Flowers to Breakout-empowered Participants, we all swayed and pulsed and flowed throughout the three days. But what was the music that danced us so?
An experience of deep listening
The Symposium was designed as a wake-up call, but not so much one with alarm bells and awooga blaring klaxons and instead one that recognized that, as the saying goes, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” … and we’re not waiting any longer! With a delicate balance of presensations from well-known figures at the vanguard of consciousness studies and practices of how to human well, to movement and stillness exercises that brought us inward and outward in connection with life, to breakout sessions where we could engage in petite conversation with two or three others, to dance and poetry and sharing from around the world. It was the kind of wake-up call that said, “hey, you already know this! We’re all here and connected to life in the sacred dance of Interbeing and interesting becoming – how could it by ever have been otherwise?”
Two Paths of Syntonizing
The symposium gently led us onto the dancefloor of participatory co-emergence, or what is more commonly referred to as conscious evolution. We explored two “paths” into augmented sentience. One came through the classical activities (and “non-activities”) of the going inward path that helped us embody and engage our sacred mission. That path involved quieting “the monkey mind,” releasing into the moment (without the need to “do anything” with it, just being present — fully present), and making yourself “available” to what arises in and through you. These three stages augmented our ability to connect and be in syntony with all that occurs within, through, and around us. The four preparatory non-movements of syntony associated with these stages include –
- slowing
- grounding
- centering
- aligning
This path of practice is one of not trying to do something or to act, but of being moved to act. It’s the difference between trying to dance and finding yourself being danced; allowing life to dance you.
The second path is one often practiced by Martial Artists and Qi Gong masters. This path involves opening all the senses, being fully present and aware of your surroundings, coming vibrantly alive and attuned to everything that’s going on in and around you with heightened sensitivity. There is a beautiful scene in the classical film by Akira Kurosawa called The Seven Samurai in which ronin samurai are being recruited for a cause. To test whether they really are samurai, they are invited into a little hut to meet the recruiter, but unbeknownst to them, someone is standing just inside the doorway entrance with a stick that they intend to bring down on the ronin samurai as they each enter the hut, one at a time. The accomplished samurai will have quick enough reactions to be able to meet and deflect the attack without any problem, but those that get bonked on the head are not considered worthy of joining the crew. Now, what happens next is really interesting and perfectly illustrates this second path of syntonizing. One ronin samurai approaches the building but stops just before entering, saying “ahh, no no no, there is a trick here – I will not enter.” His senses were so keen that he could tell there was someone just inside waiting to pounce on him even before he entered the building. He was immediately recruited.
The sort of anticipatory sense-ability involved in this second path of syntonizing can indeed be trained and cultivated. But to my way of understanding, truly awakened connection requires both paths — that of going in and quieting, and that of opening out and enlivening — and it requires them in simultaneity. Awakening to our sacred mission is all about dancing both of these two paths at once.
See my article on “Are You Available? Augmenting Access to the Akasha Dimension” featured at the bottom of the Syntony Starter Kit page for more on these two paths.
Recuerdos del Porvenir – memories of things yet to come
(title of a novel by Mexican journalist and screenwriter, Elena Garro)
Awakening to Humanity’s Sacred Mission is a re-membering of our roles and response-abilities as dancers in the cosmic jam session that has been playing since time immemorial. Time to shake a mean leg – or perhaps a more gentle, loving, and mystery-imbued one. Session 5 on Day Three of the symposium was focused on what became the Embody & Engage session, though I had originally designed it as a session to move from Vision to Action through the theme of “Practices of Interconnection: embodying and enacting our Sacred Mission.” I wanted to move beyond words into sensing sacredness, living into the ideas and words of the Visionary Speakers in the first part of the session — or rather, letting their words and ideas live in and through us. The participatory, immersive, experiential activities of the second portion of Session 5 were designed to help us sense into our individual and shared Sacred Mission — as “human tuning forks” engaging our sense of coherence, of resonance, and in the process, cultivating our Syntony Sense.
In any event, the idea behind the whole thing was to start with this vision-casting symposium and to use it to galvanize an action-engaging movement. That is, to go from the Awakening to Humanity’s Sacred Mission Symposium into another stage of Birthing Humanity’s Sacred Mission Movement. To do this, we realized that embodying and engaging were not enough, though they were a useful shorthand for the full process that flows as follows:
Embrace → Engage → Emerge → Empower → Embody → Enact → Evolve
Now there’s a dance challenge worth of Homo Sapiens syntonicus!
Joining the Sacred Dance
At the end of the three days, we were reminded that this is not the end of anything at all. Rather, it should be seen as the beginning of a movement where, together, we embody and engage in the dance of humanity’s sacred mission. It had become clear that Humanity’s Sacred Mission is not a destination. It is not an objective to be attained. Rather, it is a way of being, of breathing, of being danced.
I realized that it is truly a matter of humaning well every day, from moment to moment. When it becomes a regular way of being, there is no difference between the individual/personal Sacred Mission and Humanity’s Sacred Mission. This is a wonderful way to embody and enact the syntony quest.
If you’re feeling the rhythm pulse through you and you’ve got the urge to dance and be danced, come join us on the dance floor at Jon Ramer’s amazing interactive Kumu map. By clicking on the ‘focus’ button in the legend on the top right, you’ll be able to zoom into any circle you select and see all the people, organizations, and initiatives swinging and swaying together!
To see what this event was all about, check this link on my Events Page where you will find a recording of the session that I designed and ran.
Nov 23, 2022 | Syntony Sense, TBT- Throwback Thursday
I was once asked to create a little exercise on syntony for teens and pre-teens based on a lecture I delivered to the annual conference of the International Society for the Systems Sciences in 1999 in Monterey, California. In fact, I held a special Youth Session for the children of the parents attending that conference specifically for this purpose. My conference lecture was titled “Syntony as an Organizing Force in Societal Evolution”, but that title just wouldn’t do for the youth session, so I rephrased it as “May the Force be With You” (very original, don’t you think?). You don’t have to be a Star Wars fan to get the reference, but it helps…
Youthyntony
Here’s the research question I posed: What’s the difference between The Force and Syntony? After all, they seem pretty much alike:
- both exist all around you (not just in you)
- both involve a set of skills and competencies that you need to develop
- both don’t simply “happen” by either trying to force it or just wishing you could command the energy of the universe at will
- both need you to make them happen — they don’t just happen to you (no matter how much you want them to)
- both require attention and a kind of “tuning in” to something bigger than us
- both call on you to use your power creatively and responsibly
- both are tremendously cool (even totally awesome).
If you were to think about this Hollywood notion of The Force, without all the hype and all the pure entertainment bull that surrounds it, do you think there is anything like it that REALLY exists? If so, how would you go about learning about it and putting it to use in your everyday life (because we can’t all become Jedi Knights for a living)? And while we’re at it: what’s the difference between Spirit and The Force and what you understand Syntony to mean?
I am one with Syntony and The Force is one with me…
So, the main questions I think young padawans can help me learn about are those.
I’ll repeat them here:
- If there were such a thing as The Force, how would you help others understand what it is (without turning it into mere movie magic), and how is it different from and similar to Spirit?
- How would you learn (and help others to learn) how to tap into it and become skilled at using it every day, all the time?
That’s the training exercise. Just remember, this is not a joke for me. I really want to find out these things, and you can help.
Okay okay, I’ll go now.
– O. B. QuietTheLaszlo ⚡🧙🏼♂️⚡
If you want to see the conference lecture on which this blog is based (referenced above), you can access and download a PDF version of it here: A. Laszlo. Syntony as an organizing force in societal evolution. 1999.
Mar 10, 2022 | Syntony Story
I was asked to “explain how matter stays in form… how does it know what to be? How does my pen stay a pen? How am I sitting on a chair?” Excellent questions, right?!
Natural process clump together – and that’s good!
Well, it’s vibration and coherence and the law of affinity that creates the clumping. As Niels Bohr was purported to have said, nature plays with a sticky deck of cards… Things don’t happen according to a random distribution of probability. They clump. Your pen is such a clump, but it is made of so so so so so many smaller clumps (forming leptons forming hadrons forming atoms forming molecules forming cells and so on up to forming galaxies, galactic clusters, superclusters, and branes). It’s all entangled and intertwingled. The thing is, stuff tends more to fall together than it does to fall apart. Or rather, when it falls, it clumps.
As my friend David Schulhoff says, “it is the shuffling of the deck between hands that creates the play of emergent order each round the cards are dealt.”
So, what causes the clumping? Vibration. If things vibrate in ways that match in harmonic resonance (I just wrote in hormonic resonance, and that may be true at other levels!), they cohere. This coherence forms a local attractor that brings those resonating vibrations into connection. If they are vibrating at high frequency and high amplitude, they form what appear to be solid stuff. If they vibrate at low frequency and low amplitude, they form what appear to be thoughts, spirit, emotion and immaterial stuff. If they are right in between, they appear as both – as wavicles that sometimes behave like particles and sometimes like waves.
Does this make sense? In contradistinction to what we were taught in school, there is no “thing” there – only packets of coherently resonating vibration. These find each other out of the simple dynamics of affinity. They create space for each other, call to each other, and fall into each other to form larger packets of coherent vibration, be they material or immaterial. This is the tendency toward wholes that defines our universe, a tendency called holotropism. We see it all around us as love.
I was thinking about how to sense into these attractors – how to know that we’re not entering into coherent relationship with some aberrant expression of local deviation from the general holotropic trend. I mean, it’s perfectly possible to align with the wrong side of things, to innocently support the villain or to unwittingly sign up for a false and deleterious crusade. Sometimes people even manipulate us and take advantage of a trusting disposition – this is what is referred to as falling victim to a con, or in more contemporary jargon, to a ponzie scheme. In any event, one doesn’t have to be particularly gullible to be hoodwinked like this; the fact is that it even happens in nature. So how do we avoid being lured into less-than-syntonious situations?
Using your Syntony Sense to discern flourishing dynamics
It occurred to me that one way of sensing into the “rightness” of the flow is by converting our impression of what is going on into a sensory perception. For example, asking “what color would this situation/dynamic/condition be? Would it be sharp or smooth? Soft or rough? If it had an odor, what would it smell like?” Thinks like that help me sense into whether or not this is an attractive or a repulsive experience. I could also try to imagine if what I was perceiving and experiencing was a cloud, then what kind of cloud would it be? Or if it were water, would it be warm or refreshing or turbulent or deep? The key here is to perform a creative translation function from the conceptual/rational/analytical consideration of what’s going on to some other analogous expression that captures the essence of the experience. In effect, this is an act of alchemy – of spiritual alchemy, transforming one type of perception into another, and in the process, distilling the nature of the experience in a way that makes evident the quality of its quintessence. What the experience is transformed into is less important than the act of transformation, itself. It is through this act that the sense of rightness, of goodness of fit, can be discerned, and this helps us know whether it is in accord with the fundamental holotropism of the cosmos or out of syntony at a deeper level of coherence. Will this lead to certainty? No, I don’t think so. But it will give you a better sense of whether you want to embrace what’s going on with arms wide open, or brace yourself against it with arms tightly crossed.
If you want to dive deeper, you can find more on this topic here
