Stephen Bau and I have been BEAM(ing) since we first met in the Design Science Studio. As we sense the Land of Insideout the contours start to make themselves apparent.
Stephen: What does the Land of Insideout mean to you?
Mark: When we moved sphere into our dHome facing the eastern slopes of the Cascades I asked the land how it is called, where do we live. After days of sitting with the mountains and walking with the ancient lava trails it was revealed we live in the Land of Insideout. And of course my 2birds are always flittering about inside and out.
Stephen: this just came to mind… BEAM me up, Scotty… or, in Fuller parlance… BEAM me in, Bucky. It feels like a good title for an article.
Mark: Ohhhh that’s too funny…yes, BEAM(ing) Bucky… and I can picture the meme already!
Stephen: I am just finishing Carol Sanford’s book, No More Gold Stars, on Audible. This sounds like her description of the Land of Insideout.
The multiple frameworks, practices, and examples that I have offered are not freestanding and independent tools to be separated out and used at will. Rather, they are expressions of a coherent technology; they have the power to create transformative change, but only if they work together. I have said this in a variety of ways over the years because it is fundamental. You could put every idea I have presented here directly into action and still fail to create genuine change, particularly at the epistemological level, because this is not about action. It is about change inside of each of us, in the ways we perceive and understand the world and our roles and responsibilities within it. Put another way, indirect work is inner work, and the most profound inner work that we can do is to transform our theory of knowledge. The practices I have suggested arose from my engagement with the long-thought question that I have focused on since I was a college student. That question has led me to experiment with ways to grow the capacity in people to consciously think for themselves. All my suggested processes work together as a whole to grow this capacity, but one must be willing to be changed by them. They are an entrance into a different way of working and thinking rather than a set of nifty techniques to fill out one’s toolbox. They are representative of a much larger set of possible practices, many of which remain to be discovered by my readers as they engage in their own long-thought processes.
Discernment resources are people who believe that life has more value when it is infused with meaning. They therefore believe in and engage with inner work, for the sake of themselves and others. This provides them with a strong center, grounded in a self that is continually seeking its own evolution with regard to what it has chosen to serve. They carry their share of the load in the groups and communities they belong to, taking responsibility for themselves to avoid placing emotional or economic burdens on others. Because they are dedicated to systems-actualization, they seek to manifest increased capacity for self-direction in the people and systems they encounter. They believe that the quickest and most effective way to create profound change is to return agency and the capacity for good decision making to people, institutions, and living systems.
Sanford, Carol. No More Gold Stars: Regenerating Capacity to Think for Ourselves. InterOctave, Inc. Kindle Edition.
Stephen: I am in a Designlab meeting organized in the planet-centric channel of their Discord server.
Mark: Keep channeling the BEAM…
Stephen: We need to work on the inner state of the interveners: open mind; open heart; open will.
Stephen: It feels a lot like the Land of Insideout.
Mark: yuppers…rayfinders Seeding and Sowing the BEAM
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