The past few months I’ve been working in a culture that had no play, no acceptance of failure, and a philosophy of fear. Obviously every employee’s perspective and situation are going to be difference, but this is how I see it.
In other parts of my life, I’ve been coding/mashing data up, building services, drawing, wrecking journals, photographing, and filming. Each of these other parts, for me, lives heavily in the nexus of play, failure, and fear.
I could rant on about what the former is like, but it’s not very interesting, and unfortunately, too well experienced. What’s slightly more interesting, and something that’s being discovered by many people can be summed up in 4 points.
Play is really important.
Failure should be cherished. (”He who fails, learns” - Donal)
Fear should be embraced.
There is no I, I am all.
Play, Failure, and Fear all have a common element. They naturally occur and aren’t limited to the human experience. When we’re not allowed to Play, Fail, or Live, often funny things happen.
Don’t be a cog in the system, be a spanner in the works.
Fear of saying no, of being different got us in this mess. Society needs to become conscious of it’s actions. It’s not a comfortable process. As a whole, we look silly. No one likes to feel silly, we’ve been brought up based on the ideal of being perfect and always right. When we ask questions, we direct consciousness to the activity. An unconscious or un-thought process, becomes exposed and ’seen’ by society when we raise questions.
Asking questions (of government) is often called Civil Disobedience. As George W. Bush said, you are either with us, or you are a terrorist.
There’s ~60,000 economists in the world, almost none of them bothered, and the industry as a whole failed to ask any questions about the transactions taking place in the global financial system. The industry accepted the framework given to them.
It’s literally insane that a large portion of the world is afraid of helping others. The “us vs them” mentality is still so prevalent. When will these people learn that they live in the world, and can not be excluded from it. At some point the world will tag you, and what happens to your shielded reality then? Either it shuts down even more, a mental trick, unstable in the long term, often causing kinks. The other option when exposed to the world, is the shield collapses, which at some point will cause a ‘mental breakdown’.
Coming back from this closed, no, afraid, fear mentality is a lot of work. Why would someone want to change their reality, especially if they are ’set’ in it? Change is not cherished, it requires consciousness, it’s work, it brings about pain.
By living the 4 points, the world around you changes. When we act and interact with others, there is a meeting between the parties. Sometimes this difference in philosophy is accepted, sometimes it’s not. Weird reactions abound.
It’s impossible to make change happen in another, it has to be done by one’s self. There are ways of trying to bring it about. Zen Encounters work in this way. Meditation is about quietening the mind down and seeing how it works. Drugs are generally about altering consciousness itself to see it better, or to see life through a different filter. Physical exercise is often coupled with working with a different sort of pain. There are many vehicles, but only 1 way.
Whatever the external method, at some point it must be accepted by the internal-self/other-self. This is where it gets tricky. Being Real/Authentic to myself is the only guide I have. I’m using the 4 points to guide me for now.
