Daily pages - August 27, 2021

I’m listening to John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Ep 2, and I’m reeling a bit. I’ve heard it before, but I’m trying to understand it from the perspective of my book, and that is causing some rearranging to happen.

First, it seems clear that I need to include a Flow pattern in the book, or at least a pattern that embodies flow. For example, flow as an insight cascade is important. Flow as a precondition of good implicit learning (i.e. distinguishing causal relationships from correlational relationships) is important. And those two processes working together such that we become generators of metaphor. Able to give other the thinking tools they need to see the world differently.

This is what I used to call perspectives, and it’s one of the things about Fuller that I loved: he was a master at metaphors that could rearrange your view of the world in a few words. The idea of Spaceship Earth is a big one. I found those metaphors to be truly life changing.

So what seems clear is that not only is our process of a Creative Practice literally creating tools that we need to use the world more sustainably, we are making ourselves generators of metaphor that can spread to others. We are helping others integrate their personal universes by providing the bridges that make the interconnections. I think of memes here, but I don’t think the cute kind of memes are really benefiting us much. Through our creative practice, we are becoming modern shaman.

I think of flow as being a critical aspect of the Creative Practice. A creative practice is essentially taking on Things That Need Doing, and we don’t want to do things that are too easy or we won’t grow. If we take on things that are too hard, we’ll have anxiety and give up. We want tasks that invite the flow state because they’re challenging but doable. The trick is that it’s not easy to get a steady diet of meaningful tasks that match up with yours skills so well.

I suppose being able to get into a flow state is an indicator of whether you’re picking the right tasks. In that sense, you can give tasks the Flow Test or something like that to see if they are at the right level, or if you need to modify them in some way to make them either more or less challenging. I think that is possible, to look at a task and create a kind of flow sequence where each step is challenging but doable, that leads to overall growth. Maybe something like Flow Adjustment or Flow Path is a pattern.

There are a lot of other patterns that I’m trying to integrate from, for example, The Infinite Game by Sinek, and Every Tool’s a Hammer by Adam Savage. I feel like these are important things to work though, and I wonder if I need to work through them before I send out proposals. They seem a bit like I’m avoiding the sending out, but it also seems like they could fundamentally change the perspective of the book (for example, in how I’m thinking of the Creative Practice as the center of the book from which all other patterns emerge) in such a way that it might dramatically change the proposal.

Getting back to flow and insight and metaphor, I think it emphasizes the fact that as a creator, we need to communicate to others what we understand. The communication is part of the collaboration, and without it, we’re not being as effective as we need to be.

Short break while I finished the episode. Vervaeke touched on the idea of the Axial Revolution and how alphabetical literacy made it possible for people to reflect on their ability to transcend their base thinking, correct errors in their thinking, and they discover that they have a high capacity for self-deception. And that self-deception leads to violence and pain where self-correction leads to transcendence and wisdom.

There are parts of the book, especially in the strong personal universe section where the emphasis is on being aware of how wrong we can be. Just because we think of something doesn’t make it real or true. We are capable of self-deception and really quite susceptible to it. We have to guard against it. We have to be aware of the uncertainty of all we think we know. Even though this realization happened in ancient times, it’s something that has to be relearned over and over. We don’t seem to have integrated it into our social fabric enough that it has become obvious to everyone.