Card Sessions: Nature of Order
Your ability to perform signal processing in order to succeed is evolving,
as a function of your ability to co-articulate nature and return human.
You are almost always slightly less youer than you, which means your signal processing is at times biased from your pretending to be someone you are not.
“Socrates, always eager for philosophical discourse, agrees to accompany Phaedrus into the open country where they may together consider Lysias’s text and discuss its merits. It is summer; the two men walk along the Ilissus River, wade across it, then settle on the grass in the shade of a tall, spreading plane tree. Socrates compliments Phaedrus for leading them to this pleasant glen, and Phaedrus replies, with some incredulity, that Socrates seems wholly a stranger to the country, like one who had hardly ever set foot outside the city walls.”
— David Abram
“You must forgive me, dear friend.
I’m a lover of learning, and trees and
open country won’t teach me anything,
whereas men in the town do.”
— Sokrates
We left nature in favor of towns, philosophy and commerce. Now, we are facing the task of moving beyond both nature and culture, yet re-weaving both in an infinite play — both pleasant glens and bustling cities.
The only challenge:
behavior > feedback f(multi-order cybernetics) > agency
The only answer:
community
With a set of around 7k different questions, to Community as an Answer, that when pursued, questions and answers, help scaffold, facilitate and cultivate agency.
Card: Principles
Relate. Don’t pontificate.
Learn principles of relational
meaning-making, not rules,
not frameworks.
”Understand. Don’t memorize.
Learn principles, not formulas.”
— Richard Feynman
Once we have moved beyond, the next task is all about returning, together with a select few others, sharing our newfound insights, our stories and our grapes turned processed, aged wine, with a few more.
“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature
throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’
There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood
in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
Philosophy gave us the ability to hone and cultivate our thoughts and our culture. We went from fishing rods to iphones, from grapes to wine.
“Technology is the active human interface with the material world.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Our thoughts brought us languages, technologies and weapons of mass destruction and distraction, some which we are yet to learn how to wisely wield.
In transition, in our movement beyond and back,
there and back again: synthesis, selfhood, service.
As soon as you rediscover yourself between synthesis and service, as soon as you accept being yourself, you can articulate authenticity — your own, others and the rest of the world. Find, converse and transact with all those others who you can help and who can help you, making a difference in our world.
“The nature of reality is transactional.”
— Alan Watts
A world turning increasingly network, returning increasingly ecosystem, in which your own natural self always and already was, is and will be, a conversational, transactional part of language, of weapons of mass distraction, of nature.
“Socrates’ claim that trees have nothing to teach is a vivid indicator of the extent to which the human senses in Athens had already withdrawn from direct participation with the natural landscape. To directly perceive any phenomenon is to enter into relation with it, to feel oneself in a living interaction with another being.”
— David Abram
Returning, small moves, to our always and already living participation in an infinite play, in a context of dialogue, generativity, creative problemsolving, digitally augmented meaningful connectivity, social learning, mutuality and, last but not least, nature.
A Wash Over Our Minds
In transition, after the flood, we jointly saunter through The Waste Land, divest from our plastic sense of self, rekindle our words and reconstruct our worlds — learning into aliveness.
It’s too late. You know this already. Deep down, you are already preparing. The crash, the apocalypse, the hard vector, the autopoietic shift, the coachella hedonic abandon, the après nous le déluge, the offshore and inshore stash you still somehow believe will see you safely through the path through Scylla and Charybdis, the armageddon. Such a popular thing, this revelation, that we cherish, entertain and remain so fondly attached to it!
Upon a different journey
We left our cherished pain
Our blindness was our vision
In such a dark refrain
And as the world was ending
We turned ourselves in vain
These things no longer touched you
You made us feel the rain
You will see light in the darkness
You will make some sense of this
And when you’ve made your newfound journey
You will see what love you missed
And on the days that followed
We listened forth new words
We strained to understand them
We chased our thoughts like birds
We rekindle light in darkness
Making newfound sense of this
Now we’ve made our secret journey
Once again our love amidst
@johnkellden riffing on The Police
Mating flights associated with thunderstorms
“In New Zealand, the nuptial flights of certain moths are so influenced by the positive ion accumulation in the atmosphere that precedes thunderstorms that they can be used as an accurate guide to future weather conditions.”
To The Broken, Healing Ones
- We made it.
- What happened?
- We happened.
Secret Journey
“Hence, in America I found myself lingering near wood fires and even garbage dumps — much to the dismay of my friends — for only such an intensity of smells served to remind my body of its immersion in an enveloping medium, and with this experience of being immersed in a world of influences came a host of body memories from my year among the shamans and village people of rural Asia.”
— David Abram
In our embracing our pain,
it turns part, parcel and
parsing, it turns path.
One small step beyond your pain, you will see newfound light in what seemed nothing but darkness. This light, is you coming alive, before, during and after the crash. After the Flood, our learning into aliveness.
Awe and then Some
The generative review of embracing a wash over our minds, is perception.
“In transition, in a network, we search among the refractions and find those generative intersects, that returns ourselves to our here, awe and now.”
There is a different pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You just happened to trace a different arc, following a fragmenting, fractalising one. By always equipping yourself with the new shiny, you lost sight of sunlight. For a natural rainbow to occur, you need sunlight, atmosphere and lots of tiny drops of water.
a native, by any other language
would sense as awe-full
The Way Nature Works
“Simple explanations for natural phenomena, each well illustrated with charts, diagrams, and photographs. Drawing on a series of questions that children might ask, a team of scientists proposes answers in this manual for adult readers. They address large issues such as atmospheric phenomena, ecosystem relationships, and animal communication with brief essays, each well illustrated with charts, diagrams, and photographs.”
To The Exploring, Returning Ones
- We made it.
- What happened?
- We happened.
Natives, Rolling With Native Languages
“We appropriate new words and phrases first through their expressive tonality and texture, through the way they feel in the mouth or roll off the tongue, and it is this direct, felt significance — the taste of a word or phrase, the way it influences or modulates the body — that provides the fertile, polyvalent source for all the more refined and rarefied meanings which that term may come to have for us.”
— David Abram
hidden in
plain sight
Pot of Gold Hidden In Plain Sight
The pot of gold was safely hidden in plain sight inside yourself all the time. The key to traverse the rainbow, open the door and traverse the portal: awe.
Portal Traversal and After
In transition, at some point along our synthesis (maturation process), selfhood (individuation) and service (evolutionary trajectory) — our transitions, transactions, translations, transductions and transformations, beyond our old notions of confidence, comfort zone and entitled denial — combines and recombines in ways that starts to make new (access, attract, achieve) sense.”
Within a virtuereal environment, traversing a path involving continuous translations where the self finds itself with new ways to think or feel about reality. The self weaves new virtues and new virtuous spirals — perhaps holistic instead of atomistic, perhaps forgiveness instead of blame, perhaps relational instead of analytic.
The increasingly virtuereal self (Maturana, Scharmer) then learns to translate its world (umwelt, Hoffmeyer) and its being (becoming, sensing, presencing) in the terms of this new belief or new language or new paradigm, and this new and enchanting translation acts, at least temporarily, to alleviate or diminish the terror inherent in the heart of the separate self. Immersing our self in the transformation — part, parcel and parsing of a virtuereal becoming, means the very process of translation itself is challenged, witnessed, undermined, and eventually dismantled. …
Paths: Situate, Scan, Sort, Sensemake, Satisfice, Strategize, Saunter
A generative sequence, moving towards preferable outcomes.
Card: Satisfaction
“Thus the notion of ‘order’ is bound up with the notion of an actual entity as involving an attainment which is a specific satisfaction. This satisfaction is the attainment of something individual to the entity in question. It cannot be construed as a component contributing to its own concrescence; it is the ultimate fact, individual to the entity. The notion of ‘satisfaction’ is the notion of the ‘entity as concrete’ abstracted from the ‘process of concrescence’; it is the outcome separated from the process, thereby losing the actuality of the atomic entity, which is both process and out come. ‘Satisfaction’ provides the individual element in the composition of the actual entity — that element which has led to the definition of substance as ‘requiring nothing but itself in order to exist/ But the ‘satisfaction’ is the ‘superject’ rather than the ‘substance’ or the ‘subject/ It closes up the entity; and yet is the superject adding its character to the creativity whereby there is a becoming of entities superseding the one in question. The ‘formal’ reality of the actuality in question belongs to its process of concrescence and not to its ‘satisfaction.’ This is the sense in which the philosophy of organism interprets Plato’s phrase ‘and never really is’; for the superject can only be interpreted in terms of its ‘objective immortality”.
— Alfred North Whitehead
And as much as we, as you and I, might wish to transcend mere translation and find authentic transformation, nonetheless translation itself is an absolutely necessary and crucial function for the greater part of our real(embodied), virtual(technology) and virtuereal(Maturana) lives.
“Those who cannot translate adequately, with a fair amount of integrity and accuracy, fall quickly into severe neurosis or even psychosis: the world ceases to make sense — the boundaries between the self and the world are not transcended but instead begin to crumble. This is not breakthrough but breakdown; not transcendence but disaster.”
— Ken Wilber
At some point along our synthesis (maturation process), selfhood (individuation) and service (evolutionary trajectory)
our transitions, transactions, translations,
transductions and transformations, beyond
our old notions of confidence, comfort zone
and entitled denial
combines and recombines in ways that starts to make new (access, attract, achieve) sense. No old beliefs, no old, increasingly obsolete paradigms, no old myths, no old ideas, no matter how well worn, will stem the quest, the adventure, the movement, the drawing forth, the surfacing. A newfound sense of self(including a more presencing self) in play, enact, sense and response to a newfound path (Antonio Machado), a path that avails.”
@johnkellden riffing on Ken Wilber
“With translation, the self is simply given a new way to think or feel about reality. The self is given a new belief — perhaps holistic instead of atomistic, perhaps forgiveness instead of blame, perhaps relational instead of analytic. The self then learns to translate its world and its being in the terms of this new belief or new language or new paradigm, and this new and enchanting translation acts, at least temporarily, to alleviate or diminish the terror inherent in the heart of the separate self. But with transformation, the very process of translation itself is challenged, witnessed, undermined, and eventually dismantled. …
And as much as we, as you and I, might wish to transcend mere translation and find authentic transformation, nonetheless translation itself is an absolutely necessary and crucial function for the greater part of our lives. Those who cannot translate adequately, with a fair amount of integrity and accuracy, fall quickly into severe neurosis or even psychosis: the world ceases to make sense — the boundaries between the self and the world are not transcended but instead begin to crumble. This is not breakthrough but breakdown; not transcendence but disaster.
But at some point in our maturation process, translation itself, no matter how adequate or confident, simply ceases to console. No new beliefs, no new paradigm, no new myths, no new ideas, will staunch the encroaching anguish. Not a new belief for the self, but the transcendence of the self altogether, is the only path that avails.”
— Ken Wilber
Perspectives and Translations: Double Quotes & Riffs
Weaving new digital discourse by sharing two texts — a riff, and the original quote. Rediscovering our premises, finding ourselves considering perspectives.
Nature of Spirit and Spirit of Nature
In a network, in transition towards rediscovering nature, our generative review is all the ways we see, all our good measures that co-evolves with contextual intelligence, with a rekindling and revitalizing of situational awareness.”
You’re not yourself yet. No worries, you will be. Yes. Because deep down, you already are. You might remain oblivious about your own true nature, but once you cease denying yourself, you re-appear.
Spirit of Nature of Reality
Our understanding is in a state of transition. We engaged in rituals so as to understand, we believed we understood, we thought we knew. We didn’t.
“To be sure, our obliviousness to nonhuman nature is today held in place by ways of speaking that simply deny intelligence to other species and to nature in general, as well as by the very structures of our civilized existence — by the incessant drone of motors that shut out the voices of birds and of the winds; by electric lights that eclipse not only the stars but the night itself; by air “conditioners” that hide the seasons; by offices, automobiles, and shopping malls that finally obviate any need to step outside the purely human world at all.”
— David Abram
Understanding is all about an ongoing dynamic problem and solution re-enactment in a context of generativity and nature. The reality of which is always and already, transactional. You, me, everyone else, recognize spirit as that which catalyzes a more nature reality, spirit touching.
“We consciously encounter nonhuman nature only as it has been circumscribed by our civilization and its technologies: through our domesticated pets, on the television, or at the zoo (or, at best, in carefully managed “nature preserves”). The plants and animals we consume are neither gathered nor hunted — they are bred and harvested in huge, mechanized farms.”
— David Abram
Some of these coming transactions will startle you. This is a good thing. You will recognize glimpses of your own spirit, your own nature, as part, parcel and parsing of what will confuse you as well as move you beyond confusion, into renewal.
— But I just had a major awakening?!
— Small moves Ellie. Small moves.
“‘Nature,’ it would seem, has become simply a stock of ‘resources’ for human civilization, and so we can hardly be surprised that our civilized eyes and ears are somewhat oblivious to the existence of perspectives that are not human at all, or that a person either entering into or returning to the West from a nonindustrial culture would feel startled and confused by the felt absence of nonhuman powers.”
— David Abram
And, in the end, all our means and all our measures, can be seen as our responding to, our own glimpses of, our becoming one unique part of, spirit of nature.
A More Nature and A More Human Becoming
Play is the abductive patterning of a possibility space co-evolving with immersion in the process, and our experience of meaningful flow is our generative review of the patterning.
@johnkellden riffing on Alfred North Whitehead
Card Sessions: Nature of Order
As part, parcel, participatory inquiry and parsing our own tracing lines of our own more nature and more human becoming, always and already in transition, we enact social fields, card sessions, where we get to add our learning into aliveness from what cards we are dealt and what cards we are playing, a joint sauntering and presencing in which our participatory inquiry re-enacts our experiencing the world and where the world re-enacts us in return and in kind.
cards catalyzing conversations, turned stories, weaving outcomes; sensemaking co-evolving with scenius inside enacted social fields
— Cards?
— Yes, decks of cards helping us reframing things, catalyzing our learning to see, our learning into joint sauntering.
Social Fields: Corner of Nature, Human, Discovery & Ambiance
Above a certain threshold of holding a generative space, eg in a card session, in serious play around a table, around a 2x2 card session board — a social field comes alive. In a card session, this is enacted by drawing cards, commenting on our own cards and responding to other cards as well as our own.
“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
― Alfred North Whitehead
“Play is the abductive patterning of a possibility space co-evolving with immersion in the process, and our experience of meaningful flow is our generative review of the patterning.”
@johnkellden riffing on Alfred North Whitehead
Co-extending, Cultivating and Co-evolving
In a card session, in a dance, in a performance, we go in and out of character and various roles and conversationabilities. We lead, we listen and we follow and in moments of great alignment with the social field, there’s small group genius and glimpses of scenius, where the separation of lead and follow as performative action, transforms into a fluid movement and trust. An ongoing (virtuereal) re-enactment of trust and movement; movement and trust.
Trust and Movement; Movement and Trust
“Trust only movement”
— Alfred Adler
Perhaps a bit counterintuitively, worry is one excellent fuel for a great card session. Not worry as in “Oh, God, we’re all going to die” but more of a focussed presencing presence, listening to what happens around the table. A worry turned attention. Attention turned situational awareness. Situational awareness turned pathfinding, between here and now — and preferable outcomes.
Worry Transformed Into Anticipatory Ability
The future is not an it, it’s not even a thing. We worry about a lot of things in the future, and very few of those things actually happen. Our worry is a precious quality in our minds, which can be directed at many other things, rather than those that doesn’t actually happen.
— What to do then, with this newfound anticipatory ability?
— Play. You play, you make a move, and see what unfolds.
Play^n
“Play is generative presence in small tasks guided by a win-win-win intention and a desire to shape the future through ongoing choices combining available options leading to optimal routes to desirable ends through effective use of accessible means.”
Our experienced reality: it’s a thing!
Of the things that do happen, the real future as it turns presence, as it turns experienced reality, almost none of those things turns out the way we worried about them. This means we worry about nothing, which is good if we realize that that is what we do, and not at all good if we keep deluding ourselves that nothing is a thing.
“The art of progress is to reserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
An Unfolding Storyline
The “An” leading the sentence is essential to understand. An authentic story rather than the very often -ism-distorted, marketecture-high-jacked, framing an otherwise perfectly alive story and unfolding storyline, into someone else’s prefab frame. Do less of the distortions and you’ll find yourselves participating in a great Card Session.
“The art of playfulness is to thrive forth order amid change, and infuse generative change amid order.”
@johnkellden riffing on Alfred North Whitehead
— Ok, got it. Cards, Play. It’s about sensemaking, right?
— Yes. They’re related…
Card Sessions: Helping you reframe things
All the seven below processes are important, because of patterns, patterns of play, generative sequences, structure-preserving transformation, unfolding wholeness and how we through understanding all this, can learn to understand how to work with our own innate, inherent Nature of Order.
Corner of Framing, Cards, Play & Reframing
- Vision: Envisioning
- Consciousness: Decision Quality
- Awareness: Understanding
- Practice: Anchoring Down
- Narrative: Anchoring Up
- Path: Muddling Through (occasional unmuddling and flow)
- Possibility and Outcome: Framing and Reframing
Vision: Envisioning
Our vision is often clouded, our envisioning is very often distorted by worry
Consciousness: Decision Quality
Our consciousness and, applied, our decision quality is all about heuristics in service to our learning into aliveness. Our decisions are often short-circuited by force-fitting a problem into an existing set of heuristics and rules of thumb (the damn it, I’m just going to do what I usually do — maneuver, and a couple of hundred other fave heuristics and biases)
Awareness: Understanding
Awareness: our will turned flow; our intelligence turned ability; our behavior turned agency and ability to change; our attention, turned situational awareness. All these four, consciously integrated: understanding.
Practice: Anchoring Down
Our practice and how we are succeeding in anchoring down our practice into culture, society and our communities, although arguably at times successful, almost always come at a price: a distancing from our own nature, a social distancing and a distancing from nature. Our practice is often distorted, at least in the “western”, “modern”, “postmodern” and “post-truth” mind — people who have not hugged a tree, nor enjoyed a wild flower out in the woods, in a very long time, but instead have turned their profession, into skillful alienation, with pills and netflix two ways of coping with our success.
Narrative: Anchoring Up
Our anchoring up, our individual, small group, work and collective meaning-making is very often constrained by beliefs not our own, our hunger and quest for meaning, fitted inside prefab narratives not of our making.
In short, we frame things inside prefab narratives of quiet desperation, or, we reframe things, in order to meet our dragon, our lifeforce, consciously, as if for the first time. If we survive the Dragon, we thrive.
Meeting with Our Own Dragon: Learning Into Aliveness
“It is one thing to read about dragons
and another to meet them.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Path: Muddling Through (occasional unmuddling and flow)
Our path through life and how we re-enact our long and winding road, is very often at odds with our emotional investment in our own habits and behaviors, our fave muddling through, irregardless of whether these behaviors serve us or others well, or not. Every human alive believe themselves to be perfect, apart from occasionally picking their own nose.
But wait, there’s more! Our muddling through is very often at odds with our desire to embark on the quest, THE STORY, which invariably is met with skillful, subtle resistance from everyone else, who would very much like to keep you manageable, inside a narrative where you play a part they are comfortable with.
— How would I know I’m unmuddling myself, becoming true to my own unfolding story?
— Flow. Flow is how you know. Find the dragon inside and breathe the free air.
Possibility and Outcome: Framing and Reframing
Most our possibilities and our potentials will remain squandered. Some of this is obviously good in the sense that it forces us to ask ourselves questions of will, character and purpose. However, large parts of our framing and almost all adjacent possible re-framing is very often simply not undertaken, due to our (given the six other dimensions outlined) feeling almost as if bound by fate to look at things, ourselves and others, through our own already predestined, predetermined, fixed-frame lenses. Our glass darkly. Our dragon’s den and our potential learning into aliveness, remaining dimly lit.
Making Sense of What Cards You Have Been Dealt
If you do, you will enjoy overnight success, after seven years of Card Sessions. Which means, you and what other participants you meet on your joint sauntering, need to ongoingly negotiate a dynamic living balance between a sufficiently divergent playfulness and a sufficiently convergent participatory inquiry.
Learning Into Aliveness
Learning into aliveness is all about mind, all about how your individual mind, is only sovereign to the extent that it can choose freely, that which it must do, finding itself in between the cards dealt and the cards played.
Making Meaning from What Cards You Are Playing
Are you making a unique dent in the universe, making for a lasting difference, in service to seven generations to come? Good, that is good. The size and nature of your particular dent chosen, matters not. It only matters that you play, that you make a sovereign move in your life and assume full response-ability, in what game unfolds.
In short, remain mindful how your individual, small group genius and collective sense-making and meaning-making, can become part of a legacy that lives on, long after you’re done with your particular card session, long after you’ve played your own full round of the game.
And, in the end…
The core reason why you need to reframe things, is to enable you to play your card, make your move and make that unique dent. In our surrendering to our innate nature of order, we win. By embracing what we believed ugly in ourselves and others, we discovered that it was our thoughts made it so. By embracing nature of order, a learning into aliveness, a newfound beauty beyond belief.
