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At 09:51 PM 11/19/01 -0900, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite><font face="arial" size=2 color="#800080"><b>Self-organization
is to an organization as free will is to an individual.</b></font><br>
<br>
<font face="arial" size=2 color="#800080">I can't quite get my mind
around why this might be important. Perhaps it's that so much has
been thought and said about free will. If self-organization and
free will are analogous, then perhaps we could begin to recognize similar
patterns on different scales. That would be very fractal-like,
wouldn't it? </font></blockquote><br>
Interesting thought, if only because I think a lot of people might think
of self-organization as the absolute antithesis of Free Will. The
argument might go something like -- Since we are all part of
self-organizing systems, of one sort or another, and since those systems
are going to organize themselves regardless of what we do/will -- Free
Will is just a fond delusion. I couldn't agree with that notion, and in
fact I think it represents a profound mis-understanding of both
Free Will and Self-Organization. As I am coming to understand it,
Self-Organization is a fundamental principle in our existence, and it
applies to both organizations and to us as individuals, just as gravity
or the Laws of Thermodynamics. All these things are, to quote Birgitt,
"Givens" which describe the context or boundaries within which
our activities as individuals and organizations will take place. We
ignore these "givens" at out peril -- jumping off a cliff, and
expecting to fly is not a career enhancing move. At the same time, we can
learn to live with these "fundamentals" and (eventually) use
them to our advantage -- and this is where the exercise of Free Will
comes in, I think.<br><br>
The Open Space Experience, for me, is an important and powerful educator
in terms of our capacity to "live with and use" the principles
(or maybe I could say Laws?) of Self-Organization. We learn, amongst
other things, that the one way to close things down is to attempt to
organize it (control). This can be a painful lesson, particularly to the
old ego, which thought it was in charge. But there is good news as well,
for it turns out that much of what we used to work very hard to
accomplish will pretty well take care of itself, and we can go on to do
some more useful things. Down the road, as we get better at it, I think
we can learn to skillfully surf the waves of our collective
self-organizations in order to achieve some pretty remarkable stuff. For
me, this is where the excitement lies, and the learning curve is a steep
one to be sure.<br><br>
Harrison <br><br>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<div align="center">Harrison Owen<br>
7808 River Falls Drive<br>
Potomac, MD 20854 USA<br>
phone 301-469-9269<br>
Open Space Training
<a href="http://www.openspaceworld.com/" eudora="autourl">www.openspaceworld.com</a>
<br>
Open Space Institute <a href="http://www.openspaceworld.org/" eudora="autourl">www.openspaceworld.org</a><br>
Personal website <a href="http://www.mindspring.com/~owenhh" eudora="autourl">www.mindspring.com/~owenhh</a><br><br>
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