Flu Season
Copyright (c)2005,11 Vic Williams All Rights Reserved
Published by Vic Williams at Smashwords
Published in 2005,11 by D.V. Williams
Abridged Revision 1.00 October 20, 2011
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author
Contents
Chapter 3 The Expression Cycle
Chapter 1 Introduction
In the pandemic both normal and heroic medicine will fail, as will most centralized services including your normal food system. The centralized systems will overload and will discard or just filter out a lot of people. The 'they' in authority that we rely on will be victims too. Worse a whole lot of sick people who are out of sight and out of mind will remain there. If you are sick at home alone, you'll basically be abandoned in the chaos left by a broken system. You'll be left to rely on your local social network, if you have one.
“Otherwise healthy people are completely overcome by the virus, developing all of the classic flu symptoms: coughing, headache, muscle pain, nausea, dizziness, diarrhea, high fever, depression, and loss of appetite. But these are just some of the effects. Victims also suffer from pneumonia, encephalitis, meningitis, acute respiratory distress, and internal bleeding and hemorrhaging.” -- Laurie Garrett “The Next Pandemic?” in Foreign Affairs, July/Aug 2005
This program aims you at holistic readiness through:
Enriched understanding for taking care of yourself, both by yourself, and as part of the larger world. A living holistic solution that amounts to growing lucky.
Creating your own custom pandemic program, tailored to your mind, body, spirit, and community situation. You're starting that process right now. Keep going.
Forming a buoyant community, relationship, beyond a support group, to help you.
Learning how combinations kill. How rules fetter minds, that break when an earthquake or other disaster combines with an influenza (or other) epidemic.
Reading fast. Books and situations and body language and so on.
Growing simplicity. Intuitive simplicity that comes after learning to ride a bike, not the chaos in the learning crashes.
Instant awareness. Pills and fast food are simple fast 'instant'. And not real solutions.
Learn to face crashes, thuds and other nastys, instead of taking pills to avoid them.
Shrugging off FUD, shake off your fears and attach to your opportunities.
A healthier lifestyle, giving you healthier choices and better odds in a health crisis.
We suggest skimming through the whole thing. Then quickly read it again. Seize the opportunity to learn how to read fast. Read it some times to enlarge your understanding. As you read please keep reading, cycle around another time instead of trying to understand everything on the first pass. Also, please aim for the wisdom of larger understanding, over simple agreement (or disagreement <grin>). Be more lucky.
The learning pattern we use is akin to learning to ride a bike. It's a relationship growing process that's intuitive and logical and learning-by-doing all at the same time.
Try to explore parts of this in a group or groups. Look at creating a local community group whose members might support each other in a crisis.
What happens here?
We take a holistic approach. It's really a strategic survival approach that allows you to live a healthier life, more-or-less normally, while preparing for a pandemic.
We look at kinds of pattern locks, things that lock our thinking and habits in place so we can't steer to avoid problems. We also look at ways to step over or shrug at problems, or even seize them and and transform them into opportunities.
We play, both serious and fun play, with general and food awareness.
We do things like explore the Expression Cycle to discover how our internal views of the world often don't match other people's views. Or even our own reality when we manage to change perspective. With care we can grow to be more supportive of ourselves and of our peers. We can grow community.
The Five Levels of Awareness and the Agora Baskets are exploring tools that provide some ways to widen our awareness, to enlarge our perspective, of our physical world.
In the second section, the limbs, we first look at Buoyancy – how our explanatory style and habits shape our attitude and optimism. Then we take a peek at society's three demons, and how they lock us into certain ways of doing things. How they tether our vision of today and of our future.
Next we play with intimacy – romance – luxury. We all seek more contact with others in many ways, but our should-nots hold us in check, and diminish our health in doing so.
Third we take a quick look at exercise. Preferably in combination with meditation and/or similar ways.
In Self-Expression we explore interspersonal skills. Physical self-awareness. This leads into secondary processes.
While Living Our Myths we play with mythic awareness. If you feel detached from myth, consider them to be personal stories, concepts, metaphors, or just vague maps that are more-or-less right instead of precisely right-or-wrong. It's nice to always be more-or-less right instead of wrong much of the time. To do that we need to be able to grow or change our myths to help us adapt to circumstances.
Food as Art briefly looks at additional ways to view and interact with food. A good diet is tasty and provides natural ways to stay healthy. A junk diet drags at our health and self-esteem.
We suggest going over the book some times. The human mind learns faster and better with repetition. It picks more things up on the additional passes than it does with one slow slog. Go through it alone a few times, then do it in a group setting. Take these suggestions, play with them to customize them, make them yours while you wear them out. Grow intimate supporting relationships with your food, friends, family, and yourself.
Get your flu shot
That's the standard advice. You can google to get some key facts for normal flu conditions. The most commented on flu drug to be stockpiled is called Tamiflu.
Normally those at most risk from the flu are very young children, elderly people, and people with some other debilitating factor. The following measures are most useful for them:
Stay home when sick. Drink lots of fluid and get lots of bed rest.
Keep the kids home when they're sick.
Avoid everyone who's sniffing, sneezing, or coughing.
Cover your mouth if you’re doing any of those.
Wash your hands frequently. Alcohol wipes are good. If you use them at key times.
. . .
Companies and countries try to develop specific vaccines to match particular strains of flu. However these vaccines seem to take about six months to develop, and may not match the particular variant of the flu, pandemic or otherwise, that actually strikes a group. Worse in a pandemic the flu finds very many distressed hosts and may develop some variants. It could be that the 1918 flu tailored its worldwide effectiveness by passing through a large number of young U.S. troops being shipped to war in Europe. In doing so, it reversed past patterns and primarily hit and killed many young healthy people. The next pandemic could easily adapt to hit in some novel way that makes effective conventional vaccines even harder to develop, or possibly even inappropriate.
Some suggest getting immunization against pneumonia that occurs as a result of pandemic flu. Such pneumonia actually kills more than any other single secondary cause. And such immunizations will have benefits for some years. So it's often a better choice.
The flu shot pattern: "our Western fear of nature creates controls over process which must be kept under the domination of a sort of police force because, if it is not, we suspect process will create chaos." -- Arnold Mindell in River's Way
This 'fear of nature' seems to merge into a 'factory pattern' where we want to apply standardized treatments to people as if people are all alike. We box people into standardized packages and at the same time tell them to enjoy being individuals. We use standard flu shots for a changing process. We'll explore that pattern more as we go.
As a comparison, millions of Chinese live close to pigs and ducks and often get the flu. They've lived this way for many generations. They do things for themselves, and are much more likely to partially isolate by wearing face masks and gloves. Chinese also use traditional chinese medicine that tailors its treatments to the individual and specifically includes diet and exercise. They use a variety of herbs to maintain and enhance immune systems. They do a variety of simple partially effective things.
Combinations kill
The vast majority of U.S. soldiers who died in WWI died from the flu or its after effects. Worse, the ships carrying sick American soldiers carried the virus into war weakened Europe, thus escalating the whole matter up into world scale. The 1918 flu started on Midwestern U.S. Farms where ducks, pigs, and people lived close together, generating good conditions for new flu variants to develop.
The U.S. was gearing up for war, and many young U.S. soldiers were stressed by the process. Stressed by being together in the large group size normal for military units, by their battle training, and battle expectations. And then came the flu. This was a nasty combination, but still isolated to one continent. The flu then traveled, pressure cooking on its way in military ships and people, and was released across Europe. The Europeans had been badly stressed by years of war, and any resistance was easily overcome by the sudden injection of large numbers of sick U.S. soldiers. As the most potent weapon.
“The virus swept the world in three waves during a two-year period, becoming more infectious with each new assault. In New York City alone, more than 20,000 people died during the fall of 1918. The virus spread so quickly that scientists later learned of entire Inuit villages in remote parts of Alaska completely wiped out by the virus. Even Western Samoa, an island in the South Pacific, was overwhelmed by the pandemic, losing 20% of its population in a short time. The only country on earth not affected greatly was Australia, which had strict quarantine regulations.” ( http://www.k-state.edu/biology/pob/pandemic.htm )
Let's look at the isolation aspect. Isolated native groups, in remote villages and on islands, are often decimated when a new disease is introduced. Historically such people lack resistance to European diseases. On the other hand the Australian experience shows that effective quarantine works. Isolation, possibly as quarantine, is one of the two best traditional ways to avoid the effects of a flu pandemic.
Isolation has a flipside in that learned helplessness is a form of isolation and interacts with isolation. In the past, travellers in Canada's North noted the tendency of whole villages to develop learned helplessness. Today, whole subgroups often develop unsavory addictions like gasoline sniffing. Most North American learned helplessness is known as depression. Depression depresses immune systems, leading into illnesses of all kinds.
Most modern support groups also tend to be 'anti' or against things, which perpetuates the situation. Anxiety groups maintain the anxiety pattern, and so on.
As a further example, prisoners of war are very susceptible to epidemics. They're often depressed and held isolated in poor conditions. Once in awhile a few prisoners catch some disease and it explodes through the population. POW camps actually have to be carefully managed because they can lose a thousand people very quickly. You can find the same heightened susceptibility pattern in whole populations during and after wars or other nasty events. A 911 type disaster might depress millions of immune systems.
Try to prepare for this double whammy effect that kills so many people so fast in such situations. Try to grow out of groupthink susceptibility. Try to widen your diet beyond following marketing fads. Step out of boxes that limit your conscious and subconscious choices. Learn to be adaptable. Learn to be a survivor.
I listened to a survivor of Japanese death camps. He described how people in the camp would first catch one disease, then the next, and a third, in a very predictable sequence. They had no choice, they lived and died in miserable conditions for years. Most people sickened and died, and most of the survivors were sickly for the rest of their lives. He was healthy and happy because he was an optimist. His optimism let him shed most of the potential problems despite sharing exactly the same conditions for years. Buoyancy – optimism is an excellent way to survive all kinds of adversity. Some consider it lucky.
Traditional health systems often deliberately maintain and enhance the person's immune system as a general health measure. Yes, optimism helps immune systems. And Asians often take huang qi / Astralagus as an immune system enhancer. A good diet with immune enhancers, combined with a good exercise program forms a good way to maintain health. It's the other best traditional way to avoid becoming a flu statistic.
"I got pneumonia twice last winter." - typical comment by someone with immune deficiency, and a prime target for a flu attack. This is a common comment quoted by Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) doctors who work with the person, regrowing their immune capability with individualized treatments with a variety of herbs and foods.
Now consider how a combination type of disaster might strike you, your loved ones, or your community. It's often best to do scenarios or Agora Baskets in a group to widen your thinking, feeling, and doing, and try playing with it alone first.
Here's an example pandemic scenario. You have an effective isolation scheme working for you/your family. Only you now need food and have an accident while going grocery shopping. A sick driver has sideswiped your car. You get hospital treatment in a hospital full of sick and dying flu patients. The hospital is indescribably overloaded. Most of the hospital staff are away sick. So they just minimally treat and release you. Now that you are probably contaminated, do you return to your family? What do you do next? Sleep in your damaged car?
It's much better to play with such games ahead to time to develop ways of thinking and general responses, just like you might with backup commuting options. It's a way to become lucky.
Play with the next diagram “Boxed by Rigidly Converging Patterns.” It shows how a pattern develops that causes the epidemic of learned helplessness, a.k.a. depression, in North America. You can find a variant of it in the Buoyancy-Optimism Toolkit.
Today we've lost most of our extended family, and our other social patterns have been battered. Many people have lost connections to church, and the surviving connections are often now to big, more impersonal, churches. Most of us have much retarded connections with nature. We don't do things ourselves. Instead we opt to buy things, with an instant emphasis. Our habits lead us into dependence on others and a short attention span.
Chapter 2 Its Not Luck
“In other words, they make their own luck.”
“That's right. What I'm arguing is that we have far more control over events than we thought previously. You might say, "Fifty percent of my life is due to chance events." No, it's not. Maybe 10% is. That other 40% that you think you're having no influence over at all is actually defined by the way you think.” – Richard Wiseman talking to Daniel Pink in “Fast Company” Issue 72, July 2003 (www.fastcompany.com). You can also find this material in his book, “The Luck Factor.”
Richard suggests that we:
1. Maximize Chance Opportunities Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing, and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, which include building and maintaining a strong network, adopting a relaxed attitude to life, and being open to new experiences.
2. Listen to Your Lucky Hunches Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. They also take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities for example, by meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts.
3. Expect Good Fortune Lucky people are certain that the future will be bright. Over time, that expectation becomes a self fulfilling prophecy because it helps lucky people persist in the face of failure and positively shapes their interactions with other people.
4. Turn Bad Luck Into Good Lucky people employ various psychological techniques to cope with, and even thrive upon, the ill fortune that comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, they don't dwell on the ill fortune, and they take control of the situation.
People “unlucky in love”, or however, have poor pattern matching. They seek out poor matches. Examine your patterning. Develop self-awareness to improve your luck.
Be lucky. Be optimistic. Grow a lucky life.
Another kick at pattern locks
Observers have pointed out that the local Army and Navy commanders had the appropriate information to prevent the Pearl Harbor disaster in WWII. And the commanders who replaced the ones turfed out by that failure indicated that they would have done the same things (basically nothing), because the structure of their organizations held them in place. Only a great whack like the Japanese strike allowed their replacements to change the way their organizations interacted with each other.
"Whatever happens, the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping." Frank Knox, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, just before Pearl Harbor
The act of slicing the Titanic across an iceberg followed a similar pattern lock. Perhaps akin to using an old map, a bad map, or subconsciously simplifying the map to match one's views. There is a basic pattern match between the dominating arrogance in the Titanic pattern and various forms of subconscious rankism or bullying to maintain certain cultural conditions.
The Maginot line, and similar walls through history, show how groups of people set their thinking in place, often only to have others bypass the walls with other ways of thinking and acting. Of course many past societies walled themselves into certain ways of thinking and just died out. Many, many, individuals subconsciously do that today.
Consider this idea, follow it like a story to its growing implications. Living separated, like in a walled community or somewhere in suburbia, has noticeable quality of life benefits, but those benefits might reverse into isolated liabilities when a big change, disaster or whatever, occurs. Whole groups of previously submerged links to food, work, entertainment, and so on, will become unstable or even shatter. That shopping complex a fifteen minute drive away might suddenly be seen as an infectious death trap for months at a time. And then again, without notice, a few months later.
Small integrated communities in the same situation, with their own smaller food and other local resource providers, might well just isolate themselves from most outside contacts to provide dramatically better quality of life for their residents. Small community cells may provide substantial health benefits to members of the cells. There is a reason why it's a very successful terrorist pattern, so explore the pattern.
Contemplate the idea that tall office towers isolate people and groups in much the same way. However the floor plans in such towers often follow generic factory-office designs designed for efficiency instead of good interpersonal interactions. They are in no way sustainable social structures. In a pandemic, they force many people through a few contact points, mainly the elevators, where the flu can spread like a plague.
"The most common causes of [failure] are filtered information, selective hearing,wishful thinking ..." - Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, Fortune 10/18/04
What may be most important, individuals internalize the same isolating patterns. In “Intimate Behaviour” Desmond Morris points out that we subconsciously lower our body defenses with over stress-overstrain (and excessive hygiene) caused by the pressures of urban life, then we become ill and seek attention from others – all in ways to get socially acceptable intimacy. We have strong natural intimacy needs, fenced off by social boundaries, that we only overcome by getting sick, in a kind of subconscious trick. Marketers often call these luxury needs.
“If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber.” -- Albert Einstein
He was celebrated as a genius. His background and successes encouraged him to think freely, but people in various organizations worked hard, pushing at and walling him in, to keep parts of his thinking out of U.S. social affairs.
In “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive”, Jared Diamond studies many failed societies and comes up with some major causes for social collapse, all of them amounting to kinds of failure to adapt to their surroundings, leading into a death spiral. Worse for most of us, it's normal for all kinds of individual problems to show up inside the society as it death spirals inward.
All of this means that individuals, groups, and whole societies can and do cause significant and life-threatening problems for themselves.
“The fact is, though, that we can be law-abiding and peace-loving and tolerant andinventive and committed to freedom and true to our own values and still behave inways that are biologically suicidal.” -- Malcolm Gladwell, The Vanishing, in “The New Yorker”
"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be." -- Lao Tzu
"Handwashing Could Save a Million Lives a Year" Sanjay Suri of Interpress, a study report. http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=24115
Consider this: That many things, including the sciences, law, religions, the court and medical systems, started out as various kinds of game or play. Like the early positions in team roles. Then they formalize and perhaps ossify, developing rules and structures. They often become unworkably complex over time, so professions develop to manage the complexity and structures. This matches the perfectionism at the tail end of team roles. (For more on them, google on “holistic team roles”, include the double quotes.) Consider that today's book and computer based knowledge systems keep such systems alive beyond their natural replacement with more modern ways.
Becoming more adaptable, more flexible
Our individual and group working maps should be mythic, vague enough to be adaptable to meet reality as it comes around the corner or over the horizon. If and when we become too literal we likely pattern lock ourselves, wall ourselves in, so we can't adapt well. Worse, the patterning affects both individuals and groups, and our group structures lock many individuals in place. Once locked in place, following social norms, change becomes a crisis instead of an opportunity.
An English research charity called Natural Justice specializes in trying to find out what causes antisocial and criminal behaviour. They have shown that good nutrition, the basis for our good health, also dramatically benefits behavior. For everybody. www.physiol.ox.ac.uk/natural.justice/
Other British work shows similar benefits for a range of other ailments. Many (most?) dyslexics benefit from diet changes. The Brits suggest first removing milk and wheat from the diet (Chinese Daoists suggested this a thousand years ago). A holistic approach might adopt a natural diet, then extend out to find problem foods. People don't naturally normally eat grasses-grains or suck cow's teats for years and years. Our binding of our social structures suggests why there is no surprise to read this, combined with no impetus for change.
“All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptionsand existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging currentconceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.” -- George Bernard Shaw
A solution is to be more adaptable, to engage with situations.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but theones most responsive to change.” -- Charles Darwin
It's also the change from problem based to opportunity based thinking. To build fingerspitzengefuhl.
Fingerspitzengefuhl is German for "fingertip feel," and it's usage is more like "intimate or intuitive awareness of a system, or situation, or environment that allows for effective interactions with the system or situation.”
Why not develop your awareness, your five senses and your awareness of larger patterns (eg see the 5 levels of awareness), to live a happier and healthier life?
The black plague came out of Asia and blapped Europe. It not only killed much of the population, it completely changed the economy, the thinking, and even religious views. It destroyed the existing social path. It's effects were greatly enhanced because it hit rigid thinking. Thinking unable to adapt to unforeseen changes.
One potential 'black plague' has forms that live in migrating birds. Ducks are now carrying forms of the bird flu across Asia, Europe, and North America, so it's not just an 'Asian problem'.
Pills can be a kind of reverse 'black plague'. We rely on them when we should be relying on a good life that includes exercise, sleep, a balanced diet beyond additives, a good attitude to life and so on. No big news in that, but has that social pattern left you now living 'wide open' to disease invaders if things change dramatically? If a pandemic, or even just some personal calamity hits, will you be left clinging to a pillbox for protection?
Now a bit on crisis perspective
As the next diagram shows, (it's swiped from the “In the Hotseat Crisis Workshop Workbook”) we can enter into a crisis as if we're on a train and easily derailed into great distress. Or we can engage with crisis, interacting to find and use the opportunities in crisis. Our culture, our myths and greater awareness of our surroundings, our relationships with our environment-ecosystem, all used to provide lots of support. Today our thinking and habits tether most of us onto the train. Or onto the tracks in front of it, depending on how we view things. Play with the diagram, and your thinking and habits. Try to play beyond being entrained. Don't let yourself be tied to the tracks.
We'll continue playing with these ideas and then play beyond. We'll keep cycling around, exploring and widening awareness as we go. We'll approach things, go on, and approach them again, deepening awareness each time. Please read into the cycle.
Our worst shocks are sudden, violent, and unexpected, like some kind of crash.
Our worst risks are new, imposed, and gruesome.
If and when we're prepared we can adapt to our risks and shocks by using complex patterns, derived from 'war' stories - our myths/metaphors, adaptable culture instead of simple plans. People and cultures that can adapt can explore a web of options, stepping beyond blindly jerking on the strings of one of panic's three choices,
“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.” ~ Aristotle
Eisenhower echoed Montgomery's thinking with his, "Before the battle, plans are everything. When the battle commences, they are nothing."
Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field - I'll meet you there - when the soul lies down in that grass, ideas, language, even the words "each other" don't make any sense -- Rumi
“My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.” -- Peter Drucker
A pole, or a plan without branches-options has no choices. It's unlike a tree and is unable to bear fruit. A tree grows mostly in one direction, with many options-branches. A Sun of choices often seems to lack direction, and even makes lots of misteaks in the view of goal-driven pole/polar perfectionists. This spectrum from the pole to the sun, exactly matches our natural spectrum of human behavior, from perfectionists and our cultural tendency to generate perfective norms, through craftsmen (combine perfectionism and experiments/innovation), to 'sunny' innovators and artists.
Societies seeking perfection, one right way, are entrained, on a Titanic mission, and very different from mythic – wild societies that can adapt, play, with their situations. We need to be spectrum aware, to able to perfect, to be able to adapt, and to be able to grow new ways. Yet many of our ways, pills, laws, and especially streets and large structures are logically separated - frozen in place forbidding growth and change.
Do you have a choice. Are you entrained, or can you adapt, or learn to adapt? Do you follow fads, induced epidemics of the mind, or can you stand apart? Would you work with a coach? Or with a supportive-group – like a health potlatch?
"At first glance, this situation seems paradoxical. When we observe our natural environment, we see continuous change, adaptation, and creativity; yet our businessorganizations seem to be incapable of dealing with change." -- Fritjof Capra
In our modern society we're in effect trying to do things like take a chunk of a map of Sydney, and a chunk of a map of Beijing, and a chunk of a map of Amsterdam, and assemble them together as one whole map, just as we would a jigsaw puzzle. Too often our maps are frozen, broken up, with varying sources, and the reality they map is always changing. Mythic maps merge better into new reality.
An ancient mapping pattern, yin yang - can be seen as yin versus yang, merging into cyclic yin yang, and into five phases. Yin is more receptive and conforming. Yang is more assertive and exploratory. Or you can perceive them as integrative and differentiating, and they flow together. Both are ancient aspects of ancient Chinese Daoist ways, now adopted or matched by other ways all over the world.
Extending yin yang into five phases matches our five senses, and the German fingerspitzengefuhl. (The Chinese sometimes extend the five senses to eight, and you can find directions with the extra three using your two ears, two nostrils, and two eyes.)
“If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door.” -- Joyce in Ulysses.
Please consider the five phases to be a way to intuitively extend out and use our five senses, our five fingers (counting, grasping, controlling, stroking), and the seasons, and five intuitive basic elements of the world (water, metal, air, wood, fire). Please think of them as a deliberate enrichment of our sensory awareness to develop greater situational awareness. The whole idea of this is to develop a much richer intuitive contact with the living world, enmeshing you in the living web of our world. Developing a form of holistic dialogue that deliberately includes and maps the seasons and the ebbs and flows of life.
“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is thegreatest innovator.” -- Sir Francis Bacon
It was yet another dank rainy day, one of months much the same on the Northwest Pacific coast. The drylanders and city dwellers were unhappy and depressed, out of touch with our pouring rain reality. But the dog I watched was very happy. It had a whole range of lively new scents to explore. The world was fresh and the ducks along the beach were perky, as if they were waiting to be chased. I grinned as I watched. The animals were using rich sensory systems, less tied to visual effects and 'things to do', while the humans were displaying learned helplessness and inability to adjust to the prevailing conditions.
Which was the smarter way?
The version of the Generic Five Phases Diagram shown above combines Eastern and Western outlooks, and comes from the “Your Living Myth” toolkit. In that toolkit its main purpose is to help people discover and explore their unique high performance pattern, a kind of living myth. It works just fine for a whole range of other purposes. The explanation from that toolkit is replicated below:
I The Call to Adventure occurs when you discover some itch for change. Something, some workproject, some friend, some problem, some crisis, or something in nature attracts your attention.
II This builds in the Initiation where you develop an attraction and explore it.Developing your mission. Getting things going.
III This is followed by the Tests, Trials, and Ordeals, where things go astray. Lots ofthings don't work out and people don't understand each other. Muddling and chaos arecommon just outside the ring of light provided by the campfire of your planning.
IV Things come together in Fulfillment. A whole range of processes align as the projector scheme or however you envisage it, comes together like ripening fruit.
V Finally, for this cycle, there is Improved Flow of Life, where the results flow outimproving other parts of your and other lives. Good flow keeps your myth growingand spiraling around, throwing out options like the limbs on a growing fir tree,endlessly repeating the five phases in a holistic dialogue with the living world.
Think of these five phases as you look at the five fingers on one of your hands. Hey, count the thumb as a finger. Wiggle them affectionately, as Buddhists recommend in this situation. Your fingers can write and type and help you eat, and even wave at friends, without your conscious attention to them. In this toolkit you'll grow similar capability with more of your mind and your body and your awareness of life. And you'll build various kinds of synergy, where one plus one yields three, by the way your fingers-phases interact together. You'll build fingerspitzengefuhl as you follow your growth spiral around and around the five phase cycle.
Many people have observed that managers, doctors, many experts of all kinds, and so on, are ills-avoiding - constantly working to avoid, pain, harm, and constraints. This generates consensus-seeking behavior so the larger group can get along. It also follows the factory pattern implicit in much Western behavior, where we 'keep the factory churning out product' (try taking extra time to just talk with your doctor if you disagree with this comment).
So what happens when a holistic solution emerges, that bypasses those controls that maintain cultural norms-expert-ways-dominance?
“Patterns cannot be recognised by diligence or analytical effort. They need to evolve through continued observation, prompted by a little outside help.” -- Edward de Bono in “Letters to Thinkers”