Dwelling Mind
I have intentionally designed this book for you to read slowly and contemplatively. Curiosity and openness are important generally, but I’m sensitive to the emotional impact of reading this material, absorbing where we are as a civilization. I expect you will be both inspired and overwhelmed, depressed and committed. I had all these experiences as I was writing this. The openness of the pages and the photos are there to encourage you to rest and absorb the material. It’s tough to take this in and strong emotions will arise.
I also don’t want us to get caught in the ambush of hope. I’ve read too many authors who lay out the reality of our situation in stark detail, but then in the last pages feel the need to say something hopeful even though it contradicts their own argument. I have no interest in grasping after or reviving possibilities that have already passed. I have an intense desire for us to step forward as leaders for this time, hearts and minds fully open and wise, in service to whomever needs us.
Please don’t go through this material quickly. You do a disservice to yourself and to your potential offerings as a leader if you do. I have put in a great deal of information and included many footnotes; I felt these were necessary to develop a depth of understanding. As I was writing, I kept wondering if anybody reads footnotes any more—my publisher tells me that people read the back cover, the front cover, and perhaps the introduction. If you’ve read this far, it seems you’re not that sort of person.
I can’t imagine a more important task than to consciously choose who we want to be as a leader for this time. We must understand the time we’re in, focus our energy on what’s possible, and willingly step forward to serve the human spirit.
This book is designed to invite you into dwelling mind.8 Most of us have the tendency to read something quickly and then rush into action, to quickly figure out a response. As leaders and consultants, this is what we get paid for! It’s also a very human approach for dealing with uncertainty and strong emotions—we rush to fix rather than allow the profound discomfort that arises from difficult information. Yet if we dwell with the increasing uncertainty of this time and not rush to that comfortable place of action, dwelling mind supports the emergence of clarity for our chosen role as leaders. This is my frequent personal experience. As I tune into what’s going on and allow my grief and outrage to be present, they quietly transform into ever-deepening motivation to offer my best service wherever opportunities present themselves.
I urge you to let go of the comfort of a quick response and instead, in the spaciousness of your mind, welcome in everything: thoughts, feelings, sensations. Allow them to just be there, meeting up with one another, combining and recombining. Nothing is immediately clear, but given time and the workings of nonlinearity, your ideas and feelings may self-organize into insights. Many scientific breakthroughs were the result of this process of relaxing the mind, allowing things to dwell without any need for resolution, and then the a-ha moment. Sometimes scientists were so fatigued or frustrated that they walked away from the problem. They took a stroll or a nap and then were surprised by a clear insight, image, or solution.9
If we are to step forward with true confidence as leaders for this time, if this is the role you choose for yourself, then please give your mind and heart time to dwell in the difficulties that lie ahead, and the frequent opportunities we will have to serve the human spirit. In a memorable scene in Lord of the Rings, Gandalf counsels Frodo who, in grief and fear, is protesting against his assignment that he must destroy the ring of power, wanting to refuse his destiny.
So do all who live to see such times.
But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
J. R. R. Tolkien
OPENING: NOTES
1 This is a question posed by Grace Lee Boggs, the great activist, revolutionary, and community organizer who participated in many of the major social movements in America beginning in the early 1950s. Grace died in Detroit at age 100 in 2015. You’ll meet her in Section 4: Self-Organization.
2 The acronym, coined by the U.S. military, is VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
3 See my book So Far from Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2012).
4 Pope Francis’s encyclical in the spring of 2015, “On Care for Our Common Home” (Laudato Si), was a brilliant systemic analysis of causes and solutions to climate change. But these solutions require a level of cooperation between nation-states, dissolution of the huge egos of those in power, and sacrifice from developed nations that will not happen even though the consequences of self-protection rather than intense cooperation are terrifyingly clear.
5 I’m sure you know of many local efforts that have produced great results. My coauthor Deborah Frieze and I wrote about seven such communities in Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2011).
6 Tainter states the objective of his work is to develop a general explanation of collapse, applicable in a variety of contexts, and with implications for current conditions. This is a work of archaeology and history, but more basically of social theory. Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) (Kindle Location 124).
7 Sir John Glubb. The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival (1976), http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf. Also see the appendix.
8 The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) introduced the term dwelling mind in contrast with rational mind.
9 One of the most well-known examples of this is the story August Kerkulé told of how he discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule in the 1860s. In a reverie or daydream, he saw a snake seizing its own tail (the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros). This vision, he said, came to him after years of studying the nature of carbon-carbon bonds.