A Short Essay by Jon Brett on the Genealogy of the Idea
This is a rough chronological cast of characters that have contributed to the development and evolution of ideas behind Emérgéntly.
Remember Yoda from Star Wars? Well, Emérgéntly is based on the Ancient Wisdom of Yodimi*, Yoda's Grandmother who used to say: "may the fours of Nature be with you" which over time became shortened to: "may the force be with you".
Te Ao Mārama, the Natural World, according to indigenous New Zealand Maori, consider us all to be part of Nature where everything is connected. The ancient Greek, Empedocles suggested that all structures in the world consisted of different proportions of water, fire, earth and air. Later, the Greeks related the four Elements to four Temperaments or Humours of human behaviour or personality type. We learned too, how an ancient Chinese philosopher used Nature and her Elements to describe people according to their behaviours and health ailments.
OK, so we now know life is a bit more complicated than four elements, but they make a wonderfully rich, cross-cultural metaphor to look at anything from four different perspectives (beyond polar opposite perspectives like strengths and weaknesses).
Aristotle was a great teacher and a big fan of Metaphor. The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. He thought it was a sign of genius, and it certainly provokes creativity.
Yoshimi and Jon Brett created TetraMap as a behavioural model to understand how people are different. It is based on a metaphorical map of Earth, Air, Water, Fire equilateral triangles that fold up into a tetrahedron. They developed a simple 10 line questionnaire that can distinguish the behavioural preferences of 63,000 billion different people. These are condensed to 16 different combinations of each person's two main preferences, i.e. each of us is totally unique, but we have distinct similarities. Note that Emérgéntly is not a product that is part of the core business or approved/endorsed by TetraMap International.
The tetrahedron has four triangular faces with each face touching every other face, and no opposite faces. What a wonderful metaphor of interdependence and structure to explore how we can work together in collaboration instead of combat?
In his book, Cosmography, Buckminster Fuller stated: We wonder how it can be that nature develops a virus or the billions of beautiful bubbles in the wake of a ship. how does she formulate these lovely geometries so rapidly? she must have some fundamental, simple, and pure way of developing these extraordinary life cells and chemistries. I discovered that the tetrahedron was at the root of the matter... I have found the tetrahedron to be the minimum structural system in Universe.
Simpler than a triangular piece of paper!? Yes... the paper triangle has a top, bottom and three edges (very thin sides) totalling 5 sides, thus is more complex than a 4-sided tetrahedron.
At its simplest, any structure or system, must have at least four interdependent aspects/parts/elements.
Unfortunately, our brains prefer to break things down into totally independent, mutually exclusive opposites - good/bad, strengths/weaknesses... However, if you change the context, any strength can be a weakness, and any weakness a strength. So, to better understand something, we must not only explore the parts, but also their relationships within diverse contexts.
David Bohm was a theoretical physicist who proposed that two different realities enfold and unfold between each other. Like when the four Emérgéntly triangles are folded up into a tetrahedron, we cannot see all the triangles at once - some of them are implied. When unfolded, all the triangles become explicit. Bohm called these two states the implicate order and the explicate order. One interpretation is that most of what we experience is the explicate order which is a temporary unfolded expression of the implicate order.
Fritjov Capra asserts: While the social Darwinists of the nineteenth century saw only competition in nature, we are now beginning to see continual cooperation and mutual dependence among all life forms as central aspects of evolution. Evolution is no longer seen as a competitive struggle for existence, but rather as a cooperative dance in which creativity and the constant emergence of novelty are the driving forces... Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking... Based on the fundamental ideas of complexity, networks, and patterns of organization, a new holistic science is slowly emerging.
Yuval Harari says: Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively... Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world.
By collectively re-imagining our world as interdependent relationships instead of independent objects, we can re-story our current challenges into current opportunities for collective action and global cooperation.
Let's Dance!
Metaphor opens our minds to changing perspective AND context. Aristotle said being a master of metaphor is a sign of genius. I think most indigenous teachers would agree.
|
