Remembrance Day…
Somehow posting these thoughts on Remembrance day, 11.11.11., seems profoundly appropriate...
After almost two decades of working together to model the Pattern now known as Mereon, validating its form and dynamics geometrically and topologically, extracting the first principles, and realizing the transdisciplinary links, we remember well the mental melees that somehow always brought us closer together. In the process we forged a single bond between our minds and hearts. For these reasons and many more, we understand the challenges we face in presenting this work, and those encountered by others who are willing to consider its validity. The human condition is often resistant, and sometimes antagonistic towards innovation, especially when it involves personal or social change. We can attest to it often being so, especially when someone finds something radically new growing in their back yard, such a yard being a scientific discipline, an organization or a family.
We hear and see people screaming for change, calling for help as the “Occupy Movement” plays out in the global headlines every day. While the current awakening of the masses has in large part been caused when the economic meltdown caused the cloud of contentment to be stripped away, there is an even greater challenge facing humanity, found in the questions; What now? What’s next? How on earth do we, humanity, honor individuality, establish community, recognize cultural uniqueness, while at the same time harness the plurality of will to move forward together so to get beyond our old survival strategies?
It is time to grow beyond ego and fear driven agendas. It is time to bring our noble ideas and all heavenly minded matters down to earth for earthly good.
Our believing is that Mereon is showing us how Nature finds a way to do something. And while Nature can and does produce flaws, she is quite adept at finding and producing a fix. Alas, these too have flaws. So Nature then finds a fix for the fix, but of course, the fix for the fix also has flaws. The eventual result of all this fixing generates new generations of intelligence. It is in the remembering of what we have learned in this journey that allows us to understand the interrelationship of everything, and so identify and implement a balanced solution. In the same way, Mereon presents an opportunity for us to think, imagine and present new solutions. For some it will be escaping our ‘old boxes’, for others, at least remodelling them. It is an invitation to investigate and ask new questions, evaluating Mereon based on their prior knowledge, doing so with the willingness to see how it might include and yes, even evolve that knowledge. We do not present Mereon as the Answer. We do however, have the courage to present a model that has given us long pause, compelling to us to repeatedly re-question everything we think we know, answering and re-answering to the best of our ability in any given moment. Alvin Toffler summed it up when he said, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Mereon, a mathematically/geometrically and now socially validated model, presents us with an opportunity to learn a new language, and we posit, identify our universal ways of being. Austrian biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, founder of the domain of General System Theory, long pursued a quest to find such a universal template. The following quote underscores his drive, implicitly describes what Mereon is all about: “Thus, there exist models, principles, and laws that apply to generalized systems or their subclasses, irrespective of their particular kind, the nature of their component elements, and the relationships or “forces” between them. It seems legitimate to ask for a theory, not of systems of a more or less special kind, but of universal principles applying to systems in general.”
Inherent in Mereon is precisely such a set of universal principles. Over a decade ago, the Dalai Lama said, “Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of Universal responsibility, not only nation-to-nation, and human-to-human, but also human to other forms of life.”
Today is, and every day must become the ‘today’ the day the Dalai Lama spoke of.