Re-generation Lounge; two steps and a bite.

It is one of the finest and most elaborate perspectives to perceive the world as that which comes forth through our actions, through our perceptions, through our ways of communicating. Viewing the world as such, it becomes clear that our world is not a mere place, our world is a happening. The following is dedicated to this perspective.

Step One: Realizing there is less to be done

apple Looking at the world, one easily gets the idea that something should be done immediately. Whether it is your laundry, your job, your relationship, your country, the environment, everything in this world seems to call for action. Then again, we experience that if we indeed do more, this rarely leaves us with less to do; more often we recognize through exactly this little bit we did that there is even more that should be done.

Trapped in a vicious circle, we try to hunt down the moment when we can relax, let go, and regenerate, while at the same time we always bring up new tasks we have to perform before we can allow this moment of regeneration to happen.

I have watched myself acting this way for quite a while, trying to improve myself, trying to better the world, trying to change what in my view had to be changed. Some things did change, and, after all, I have not given up hope that other things that I wish for will eventually happen. Still, a step back and a little time-out from my daily routine have led me to a very important insight.

If everything in your life seems to call for action, it can be safely assumed that you have already done too much.

This insight has proved very valuable for my understanding of the world. It led me to a simple, but intriguing thought: If the world seems to be a mess and this mess is created through our doing, it is advisable rather to do a bit less than to do a bit more to achieve a higher degree of order.

These were my thoughts when Barbara offered me the wonderful possibility to write a regular column in Patterns.

Whenever I read Patterns I have the impression that this feeling of both love and concern for our world underlies everything that is written in this journal. For me, the journal is part of a serious attempt to create different structures, to offer different patterns of acting, of re-organizing, of improving a world which strongly needs improvement.

I would be glad to add my thoughts to this undertaking, and it is clear to me that a re-organization of ourselves and our world cannot be done in a traditional scientific manner.

The traditional way that scientists have tried to do this so far always evokes a very uncommon picture of Helmholtz's locus observandi within me.

As the idea of this imaginary place guided the way most traditional scientists viewed themselves and their doing I would like to share my own personal story of this place with you now.

Step Two: From the peephole..

For centuries, scientists have gathered around one peephole at the locus observandi in order to get an "objective" look at the world, thinking that they would get a better understanding of the world. In the beginning, this was a highly ordered affair with only a few scientists around, who got a look, articulated their arguments, withdrew for internal negotiations, and presented the results to the public as "Laws of Nature."

However, after a while, things got out of hand, as more and more scientists crowded the locus observandi trying to get a look through the little peephole. Standing in line, some scientists got impatient and decided to construct their own peepholes. These peepholes, reserved for specific groups of scientists, are now known as disciplines.

Through the multitude of disciplines and peepholes the problem of communication became more and more severe , partly caused simply by the fact, that someone looking through a peephole gets only a very restricted view of the world. Furthermore, it is extremely difficult to communicate with someone else while looking through a peephole.

Consequently, the problems and arguments of the scientists could no longer be solved in private and had to be taken to court, where the public discovered that what was presented to them were not so much laws of nature, but human arrangements.

As these arrangements strongly influenced the public, restrictions on the peepholes that could be looked through were called for, so that the public would no longer have to accept the results of the negotiations as laws of nature. It was also decided that it was too late and generally not enough if those matters were only discussed at court as the effects arising from some of these "scientific observations" proved to be too dangerous.

The public got the idea that the observations were confusing a lot of things, sometimes brilliant, sometimes disastrous, sometimes both at once and sometimes they were simply tedious. The idea that these observations were neutral, was increasingly hard to believe.

..into the lounge

apple Within the systemic or cybernetic movement I see an understanding that the whole procedure of acting and thinking has to be altered because a mere restriction will not result in the necessary changes.

Cyberneticists, looking not so much through peepholes and the narrow picture that can be seen through them, but at themselves and the world they live in, have begun to change the entire process of scientific self-organization.

PATTERNS is a journal that takes such an approach, as it actively participates in both a re-invention of science and a re-invention of ourselves.

Thinking about how to join those re-inventions I realized that I would like to create a pattern of continuous re-generation within those PATTERNS that connect us. In this pattern we could bid farewell to the Locus observandi and allow our minds to create a place that is more appropriate for coming together and creating a world, such as lounge, a re-generation lounge.

Conversations in cafes or lounges have a strong reputation of changing our reality as those are the places were we feel comfortable. For what really matters does not happen because we specifically stress its importance, but because it is the outcome of a self-organizing process in which we are totally involved. And therefore, it happens naturally when we let go of our momentary issues and take time to regenerate. We become aware of our own self-organizing processes; we realize how to participate in these processes, and, as everything within us works in this direction, it appears to be relatively effortless.

If we as a group immerse ourselves in such a re-generation process together, it builds and reorganizes our social and organizational structures. It happens naturally if we let it happen.

A bite in an Apple that connects

Of course this sounds like a dream, and indeed, the subject of dreaming is closely related to re-generation, as both of them restructure us if we provide space and time for this to happen.

In this way our path is partly created by ourselves, partly it comes forth, just like Alice's path through Wonderland, through every step we take. For the concrete procedure I suggest that we use a mixture of storytelling and conversing, whereby we can read stories, and can post comments or have a virtual conversation at a website related to our project.

I myself will provide new stories and patterns of re-generation each month, by means of which I would like to offer means and stimulations for a systemic and organic perspective of how we generate this world.

A perspective within which, as Alan Watts puts it, we experience that we are not strangers born into this world, but grow out of it. "Just as the apple tree apples, the earth peoples!"

Or maybe even one step further; when we understand through our own participation that we generate this world just as the apple generates an apple tree.

Through the story of Alice it is well-known that miraculous things can happen if one takes a bite of such an apple.

Which reminds me of the story of one famous gardener of the ancient orient who could, so it is said, create a whole apple garden out of a single apple - but of course this is just one of the many things that could happen.,. if one dares to have a bite.

To be continued...

Lucas Pawlik