— Gregory Bateson”

I challenge individuals to think differently. Personal lessons do not have to stay within our private borders. In fact, they are a fountain out of which flows our public creativity.

Neeleman inspires us to bring the best of who we are to the workplace so that we can bring more soul to our company culture.”

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Revolution: “The last class I took before I went out on the road was “The History of Southeast Asia”. The books were required reading. They were so dense with information that I wanted to read them again. I do not remember the titles or authors of the books. I just remember that my mind was blown wide open to the world of corporate dominance and man’s war on nature and indigenous people…I read these books while waiting for rides or during the long hours riding across America. I learned a very important lesson about listening, talking and peacemaking. If I were reading something I thought was true and shared it with the trucker and he thought it was untrue, I never challenged him. I asked him to tell me, in the form of a story if possible, what was not true about the reading. In this way I learned to listen to a much more expanded version of reality.” Via Ted Ernst.
  


• A great joke on why you don’t mess with Canadian women.


• The US Premiere of Amelia Cuni & Werner Durand’s “Ashtayama – Song of Hours” at Other Minds 10, 2004. An amazing 58 minute long piece of music: “An audio-visual meditation beautifully pure in its austerity and clarity of purpose. Raga-based Ashtayama embodies an Eastern idea of Time and the power of musical language to illicit emotional response�the �rasa� or essence. Cuni, one of the few Western women to have mastered the classical Indian �dhrupad� style of singing, joins creative forces with electronic composer Werner Durand and lighting and stage designer Uli Sigg in this multi-media phenomenon.”
  


• Joseph Cornell on flow learning for kids: “n Western culture, especially, people often confuse knowledge with wisdom, and think that if we learn enough, then we’ll care enough. But knowing what we ought to do, and doing it are two different things. Tanaka Shozo, the pioneering Japanese conservationist, said, “The care of rivers is not a question of rivers, but of the human heart.” For love is the greatest stimulant to the will.” Via word gravity.



• Brian on educating for the unknown: “When I survey the educational landscape, what I see is a system that prepares people for what is already known, or at least, we assume we know it. And all too often, that which is known is of little interest to those who are told to know it. In other words, knowledge is not something that is integral to the individual. Knowledge is also given a static character in the system, and any movements or trends in knowledge are, at best, accommodated by the way of revised curricula and textbooks. This guarantees that a body of knowledge that is already completely removed from its context is also guaranteed to lag. If a body of knowledge is deemed to be controversial, it is either sterilized or abandoned. The level of underlying fear that permeates the education system is staggering.”


• Dan O’Connor on the psychic cost of choice: “So the next time you find yourself overwhelmed by the dizzying variety of options to marginally enhance your state of mind with some cheap consumer good, it may help to recognize that the real opportunity cost of the choice you’re contemplating is not to be found in the prices of the goods you’re sifting through but in the loss of whatever peace of mind you had before engaging in your costly search.”