Spiritual solutions - how we can become like termites

Note -This is a continuation of the prior post, on termites, lasers, and solutions to our social problems an unemployment and failing businesses and failing solutions to global problems like pollution, water supply, global warming, etc.

OK, where are we? We know that:

• Incoherent solutions to fragments of our social problems seem to be consistently making the totality of problems we face simply get worse.
• Coherent solutions can deliver a thousand times the power of incoherent solutions, for the same amount of individual effort. (example, lasers.)
• Coherent solutions can solve social problems that cannot be solved by ANY amount of individual solving-efforts, because the problems are LARGER and MORE COMPLEX than any individual, regardless how bright, can possibly understand.
• Efforts at "education" to make individuals even smarter are doomed to fail, because we can't reach even our current level of required wisdom if the problems stood still, and because our very efforts to get to that level will make the problems even worse than that.
• WE have some models of coherent action (lasers, termites, very high performance teams.) We need to look for solutions that don't involve making each PERSON smarter, but that involve making the TEAM smarter, which is an entirely different thing.
• This is WONDERFUL news, because we already have headaches from trying to get ourselves individually smarter. Besides, as our 20% dropout rate should be telling us, the process is too hard to do and even if we do it, it won't deliver jobs, or business solutions, regardless how much we do it or how successfully we do it.
• We're barking up the wrong tree, in the wrong ball-park. "Rugged individualism" has had it's run, done it's thing, and has grown old on us. We need a new theme for the new season.

OK. So say we wish we had the coherence property that termites or very high performance teams do. How do we get there?

Well, duh, how did termites get there? Hint - it did not involve commissioning groups to study the nest-building problem.

One thing we are NOT looking for, in other words, is a "top-down solution" where a select few of the "best of the best" of us put their heads together and devise a plan that they then share with and, frankly, attempt to impose on the rest of us.

Where does that lead? We've all seen it. As soon as they start to implement THE PLAN, a billion "small things" that the elite group didn't know about will surface as problems in implementation, and, in totalitarian states or the usual business situation, those who see these problems will be branded trouble-makers and told to shut up or leave the group to those who continue to have faith in "THE PLAN". After a few more years as it become apparent taht "THE PLAN" is not working, a huge campaign will show up instead pouring blame on some group of enemies of THE PLAN that, surely, if those people were eliminated, the PLAN would have worked. So a NEW 5-year plan will be developed, and the cycle started again. We've tried that for a hundred years or so, and it got us where we are today, very deep in a hole and getting deeper.

So TOTALITARIAN centrally-conceived PLANS do not work, cannot work, will never work, cannot be made to work. Scratch that idea. Nothing created at the top and then imposed over sincere opposition based on ground-truth-that's-invisible-to-those-at-the-top will work.

We also know that incoherent plans, letting everyone simply do their own thing to survive locally, does NOT, magically, sorry Adam Smith, produce a workable solution. The issue is not that the market-based solutions are not free enough -- they ALSO fail because they lack an overriding context of coherence.

What we NEED is a combination approach, that includes an overarching coherence that we can all detect and live with and tap into, WITHIN WHICH individual and group action can take place that now ADDS UP to something that not only solves local problems, it ALSO solves global problems, and not only works NOW, but works FOREVER going forward, so we don't need to solve THAT problem, socially, ever again, and the net sum of solutions starts accumulating to a global solution.


We need, in other words, a BETTER invisible hand than the free market, so that people can within that context, continue, like dumb termites, to act locally, but that will result in the overall actions to SOLVE issues globally.

This does NOT require, thank God, that each of us "comprehend" the "big picture". None of us can comprehend the big picture, and won't ever be able to grasp it. BUT we can develop a way to SENSE the big picture, and SENSE whether an individual action we are contemplating FITS or does NOT FIT with it.

We CAN tap into a kind of signal that gives us a response that is more or less simply "yes or no", or actually "better here or here?" iterated over and over, times 6 billion people, times a hundred times a day.

We can tap into that signal because, again, thank God, that signal ALREADY EXISTS.

Whether it exists because in some theological sense GOD made it, or in some scientific sense nature made it, or in some practical sense the very existence of life on earth creates its own coherent signal, is not the question for us here. Probably, all three answers are simultaneously correct, by the way.

In any case, it's my observation, conclusion, realization, and hypothesis for you to consider and us to evaluate, that this coherence signal ALREADY EXISTS -- we just need to figure out how to locate it and tap into it and harvest the creative power it releases as we do the VERY SAME THINGS we used to, except, now they work out , and before they didn't.

The pathway to finding that signal, a sort of global WIFI that our own bodies and hearts and minds are receivers for, is what all my prior discussion of "intimacy" is about.

INTIMACY, in the correct sense of the term, involves letting go of preconceived notions, letting go of selfish and self-centered constraints, opening up to outside life, becoming sensitive, becoming vulnerable, letting go and allowing one's whole identity to receive the MESSAGE by altering our internal DNA, our program for life, our values, our sense of meaning.

This is not pie-in-the-sky. This is a strong assertion that, by learning how to LISTEN to what our HEARTS are telling us, individually and in groups, and by learning how to RESPOND to and INTERNALIZE those messages, we can indirectly achieve the coherence we need, socially, that our very same puny, local efforts transform THEIR OUTPUT into socially powerful solutions that actually work. (Unlike the plans made by small groups of men, which always fail.)

Back to the WIFI model -- what is being broadcast here, and what we are swimming in a sea of, are a different KIND of proto-message-stubs. LIFE is far more efficient than we are, for one thing, and doesn't broadcast high-value signals into the void, where most of them are simply lost forever. (That is more like bleeding than transmission.) LIFE only puts out there the initial stub of a signal, a tiny signpost and link to a slightly larger and more powerful link to an even stronger link, etc. We need to follow the chain to get to the meat of the signal.

Follow does not mean walk along. It means, at each step, that we ACCEPT the torque the signal puts on us and asks us to change in our own lives and sense of meaning. WE can't save up the parts of signals and say, no, wait, let me see where this goes before I say yes to any part of it. These are not that kind of man-made signals.

ALSO, I've discussed before, there are, physics tells us, THREE kinds of signals that can be sent. Our radios in our cars have TWO of the three -- we can transmit our signal by changing or modulating the AMPLITUDE of the signal, which is called "Amplitude Modulation" or AM. That's type one of three.

We can bury our signal in changes in the FREQUENCY of the carrier wave, which is called "Frequency Modulation" or FM. That's type two of three.

And finally, the one we've missed and should have started with, we can bury our message and signal in the PHASE of the carrier wave, which is called "Phase Modulation" or PM.

Note -there is effectively an error on the first page, in figure one which tells us PART of the truth, but not the WHOLE Truth, when it says "Fig 1: An audio signal (top) may be carried by an AM or FM radio wave." Yes, it can. But it can ALSO be carried by a PM wave.


An example from the internal world of computers. Way below what computers DO, or applications, are programs of software. Way below the software, there are levels of HARDWARE. It is inside that hardware that a VERY SUBTLE and ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL dance takes place, or must take place, for the applications to work.

All computers have internal clocks or synchronizers. Often there are in fact THREE different signals, sometimes called by their greek letters as phi-1, phi-2, and phi-3. These are, in fact phase signals generated by "clock pulses." The different parts of the computer only work in the outside world as "a computer", instead of a pile of junk, if all of the parts of the computer cooperate in listening for and aligning themselves with these PHASE-LOCK LOOP SIGNALS.

The parts can still do their individual tasks, and have, essentially free will, in that sense, but they ALSO all agree to operate IN STEP, in some ways, by accepting the additional small burden of TIMING their action to be "on the beat" as it were, instead of whenever they feel like starting.

SUMMARY

For large collections of active thingies to work together as "one", and make a living active "one" not a heap of incoherent rubble, each of the active thingies has to give up a tiny part of its freedom of action, and agree to TIME its actions in a way that FITS INTO the way everyone else is timing THEIR actions, so that, together, the actions all ADD UP.

This is what atoms do in releasing their light in a laser. They achieve "phase lock" by an iterative process of looking at each other and basically beings sensitive to "now? now? AHH, NOW!!!!".

Atoms don't have to become electrical engineers to accomplish this. They just need to "get with the program" and "stay on the beat."

Termites don't need to become industrial engineers to accomplish great industrial engineering feats. They just need to stay sensitive to whether what they are doing, in some sense, FITS with what else is going on around them, and "go with the flow" on that "fit" thing. Sometimes they surely must think this lump of mud they are carrying would look best if it went THERE instead of HERE, but if HERE is what the concensus opinion is, hey,all the same, fine, I'll add my lump HERE.

HUMANS do not need to become super brilliant to solve their problems, and they don't need endless study commissions and central planners. What they DO need is to learn how to be sensitive to EACH OTHER, because THAT simple small seemingly insignificant change will transform the COLLECTION of us from an incoherent pile of protoplasm into a SINGLE HUGE RECEIVER AND SOLVER OF PROBLEMS, which, then, in turn, can figure out how to deal with pollution, water supplies, global climate change, corruption in high places, and, not the least, full employment and whatever it takes to keep us all healthy.

AND, this can be done without central planning, without giving up personal freedom of action to any small group of people who want to "run the world". No one can run the world any more than a small group of cells could "take over" our brain and "run our body". We're past that stage in industrial and social evolution where problems can be "solved" that way. We need a new way. We have a roadmap and models.

My next posts will share the vision of how we can use the power of social networking tools on the internet, and virtual reality, to build the amplifiers and synchro-nizers and sensitive-izers and other exotic tools we need so that we can learn how to be intimate, how to learn to actually hear each other, and how to learn to actually "hear" (by accepting and adopting as our own) the "word of God" as it were.

This is a small burden, a small price to pay, for the benefit it brings. No body needs to take over anyone else's land, property, wealth, or freedom of action, or listen to some central planning committee that will do a terrible job of trying to run things based on misinformation available at the top that doesn't fit reality on the ground.

This is something we can DO. It can be IMPLEMENTED in our lifetimes. EVERYONE has a chance to participate and learn how to do it together, and share what they learn.

It can be fun. It should be fun. Life should be fun, and revitalizing, and rejuvenating and inspiring. Sensing that one is already part of a much larger, and even more beautiful LIFE, and synchronizing with it, is a pleasure. We're driven to it, and drawn to it.

Go with it, Obi-wan. It IS our only hope. (A reference to Star Wars for those who miss that.)
or maybe, the right thought is "Trust the Force, Luke!" Victory is not in the "cognitive" world, not something we can plan in detail.

There is a component of synchronizing with the universe that is absolutely required if our efforts are to amount to anything.

It's within our reach. We just need to use our existing technology to assist us in each turning a few degrees towards each other, followed by repeating that action, and repeating it again, and again, and again. The solution is "unbounded upwards". Prepare to join the rest of the visible universe. Prepare to be astonished and what that seemingly trivial change reveals all around us.