Making a Heap into a System You can have a heap of ideas—most people, including myself, do—this one, that one & several others all higgledy-piggledy; it’s possible that they may be connected in some way—everything is sub specie aeternitatis—but when they are in a heap all the possible connections are difficult, if not impossible, to […]
The Best is Still to Come Between 1993 and 1999 I lost count of the times I taught a three day workshop described as Stephen Covey’s ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’; I taught it so often, several times with Ed Percival and sometimes with a learning partner, that I even began to become rather […]
What is the Purpose of ‘The Work’? A good question to ask is—What is the purpose of anything? When the superlative English artist Ben Nicholson was challenged to explain the purpose of his more abstract paintings he said, “When you see a tree in the middle of a field you don’t go asking what its […]
(For Sarah—for mentioning Montaigne during an Enneagram workshop) For some strange reason, ‘Christmas’ offers many people an opportunity for a peculiar kind of celebration which seems to entail spending vast amounts of money. Over ‘Christmas’ 2011 I decided I’d celebrate in a peculiar manner by re-reading the selected essays of Michel de Montaigne. I first […]
‘How foolish is that business man who does not sell out and retire to a small country cottage with his little income of a pound or twenty-five shillings a week, where he could eat, sleep and read in peace and walk abroad admiring Nature. Thousands of businessmen could do this and would if they were […]
There is a certain something-or-other one might call a Whole, a Great Chain of Being, a Grand Undifferentiation, everything connected up together while seeming to be separated, the step-on-a-butterfly-in-Outer-Mongolia-and-a -little-lad-in-Birmingham-falls-off-his-bicycle syndrome. You can easily get the feeling of the Great Unity of All Being by stepping outside of a spring night to gaze up at […]
Think for a moment about these words: ambition, anger, fear, love, excitement, enthusiasm, energy, intention, attitude, consolation, desire… Those will do for a start. What do they have in common? Yes, they’re all words that have the appearance at least of referring to things that are supposed to go on in the inner workings of […]
A few days ago I heard myself making the rather rash statement that if I had done anything right as a parent umpteen years ago it was to help create the conditions for my children to be able to choose to be open-minded. I wonder if they’d accept that they were offered such a choice… […]
I was fiddling around with the structure of an exercise to do with getting rid of Negative Emotion—the kind of thing that gets in the way of what we want to achieve. Doesn’t happen very often, of course, but it can be pretty debilitating when it does. It could be adapted to help people cope […]
An extract from ROOM FOUR referring to Logical Levels… Combologue 4 There’s a model of analysis that covers the whole of human life in a sequence known as ‘Logical Levels’; the idea in its current form seems to have emanated from Gregory Bateson: we exist in an ENVIRONMENT where we DO various things knowing full […]
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