Who else can we thank?

Another way of saying it:

God is not on the Left, Right, or Center.

I know that is blasphemy to millions. But they seem to be worshiping tribal gods. Tribal gods are OK, but brittle.

Thank God, or the creative nature of the universe, that we are not all on the right, or all on the left, or all in the center. We are only all human, and only all earthlings.

If we were all on the right, or left, we would certainly hurtle over the cliff of our choosing, even faster than we’re now approaching the cliff that no one is choosing.

If we were all in the center, we would still be getting closer and closer to the non-chosen cliff, because there is too much investment in the status quo, and too little appetite for change.

But we’re not all in one place, one ideology, one proclivity, one style, one perspective.

That’s not a design flaw; that IS the design.

Even though that’s the design, we rail against it.

Even though, by our nature, we’re not all of one perspective, we’re in huge trouble now because enough of us haven’t waked up to realize that all our perspectives and peculiarities are needed to survive and thrive.  Or, that is, all are needed to be part of our on-going conversations, deliberations, adaptations, and innovations.

My heroes (dual gender) are those who have waked up to that, and who are able to speak well, and model well, in ways that are convincing to large segments of center, right, and left. Not just talking and inspiring (though those are important) but demonstrating – not as in protesting, but as in showing how.

Bodies are memories, constantly remembering how to recreate and repair themselves, with slight deviations, gradually noticed as age.

Bodies – appendages, organs, cells, and genes – also retain a memory of millions of years of evolution, passed offspring to offspring.

Even rocks retain memories of ancient sediments deep in long-gone oceans or in churning fiery depths inside the earth.

Organizations are memories, also remembering how to constantly recreate, repair and maintain, all while learning to adapt.   There are restaurants in China that are thousands of years old, governments and their agencies, corporations and their offspring and mutations, all persistent memories.

Without memories, no continuity, no underlying stability, no identity.

During sleep I forget, forget who I am, and dream of strange new identities and settings, shifting from one to the next.  I lapse into deep sleep and forget even my dreams.   I wake.  My body is still here.  All my memories are still here – reminding me of my identity, my ambitions and desires, my plans, my worries, my friends and enemies, and what’s in the refrigerator.   From  nothingness during the night, each day “I” am reincarnated.

And via the Internet we can find how many times and how many people have recorded variations of these thoughts.   Together we are the memory of our species.

Now to the most recent reason I started thinking about this:

Tulkus – Passing Memory and Identity from Life to Life

I recently read a book that explained in more detail than I had known before, about tulkus, reincarnations of Tibetan lamas.   The most famous tulku is the Dalai Lama, who is considered to be the 14^th reincarnation in a line that began with the first Dalai Lama, born in 1391.

The book I recently read (and quote from below), The Dance of 17 Lives, by Mick Brown, 2004, is about the most ancient line of tulkus, the Karmapa lamas, and especially about the 16^th and 17^th Karmapas.   The first Karmapa was born in 1110 AD; the 17^th was born in Tibet in 1985, and also recognized and installed there as a child.  He escaped, under the noses of the Chinese, in the last few days of 1999 and fled to Dharamsala, in India.

From reading about tulkus, it is clear that much more than myth and untestable belief are involved in making this amazing system work.   Whether one believes or not in reincarnation of old souls into new bodies is not of great importance.   What is most interesting is how the system is able to transmit a huge body of personal memories, teachings and understanding,  relationships, and, in effect, entire identities from one incarnation of body and mind to another.

As stated by one lama interviewed by the author, “The Dalai Lama says that being a tulku is like a raw diamond – not worth much. You have to cut and polish it.  You have to study and practice.  Being recognized as a tulku is the beginning of the process, not the end of it.’”

The description of the training of newly recognized tulkus is especially interesting (p. 29):  “Like a young king, the tulku was therefore at the centre of an elaborate court of attendants, teachers and administrators, the object of enormous care and attention, and of an investment in manpower and money which would last for many years. … such attention would, in normal circumstances, be expected to turn any child’s head; but the teachings the young tulku received were specifically designed to counteract this and to develop the qualities of humility, self-effacement and a detachment from the worldly wealth and power which surrounded him.  …Only after years of such training would they be considered ready to assume their role as a teacher.”

In the case of the Karmapas, the book describes how there is a very large core of knowledge and teachings, called the “Golden Rosary” and dating back 900 years, that have been transmitted by the Karmapa to a few of his closest followers.  These closest followers are themselves high tulku lamas that serve the Karmapa, life after life, making the relationships especially meaningful and close. When a Karmapa dies, these core followers then assume responsibility for teaching the tradition to the next Karmapa, so that  the link is never broken. As stated by one of the Karmapa’s closest followers, “’The teachings of the Golden Rosary comprised innumerable different practices, and there was a lineage for every one of them – for each initiation, every ritual, for a multitude of meditation practices.’”

As indicated, this type of reincarnation requires an immense, interconnected system of traditions, teachings, devoted followers, and accumulation of wealth.   It is a system that created and maintained one of the most remarkable and inspiring cultures in the world, lasting many centuries, and still surviving.  Tulkus are obviously not just people, but great social and spiritual institutions that are maintained in unbroken lines.   Unlike kings and popes, a tulku does not just inherit a title, teachings, and devoted followers, but an actual personal identity and a set of close personal relationships.

In modern societies, we have evolved similar yet secular institutions:  Governments with their constitutions and offices, corporations with their charters and offices, agencies with their mandates described in legal codes.    Even though our governments and cultural institutions are largely secular, great principles are often involved, passed down, fought over, and fought for.

Corporations, with their continually reincarnating identities, are recognized officially as citizens with full rights, and often enormous power.    Yet there seems to be no adequate system for also ensuring that these institutions will also continually reacquire the wisdom and concern for the common good that should accompany such power.   Though recognized as citizens, they seem instead to be expected, and even legally required to behave in self-interest above all.    But this seems to be getting into another subject.

Let us build good memories to pass on.

Oct 27 post by Jennifer Leggio (ZDNet):

2010 Predictions: Will social media reach ubiquity?

The predictions are from 31 people in Jennifer Leggio’s personal network.   It’s a great collection, and valuable to read through all of them together.   A lot focus on use of social media for marketing, PR, and enterprise collaboration (a lot of the predictors are engaged in consulting or software for those areas).

Common themes:  Social media will indeed be ubiquitous; will spread more in the enterprise; will need more privacy controls (or not); will have more location-based apps; will require more filtering.

Here are a few excerpts that especially interest me:

Caroline Dangson, IDC – @carolinedangson

“IDC survey data shows more than 50% of worldwide workers are leveraging the free, public social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook for business today. IDC believes the primary reason workers are using the consumer social media platforms is because their organization is not providing these types of tools itself”

(I believe there are other very good reasons for continued use of consumer social media platforms in organizations.  E.g., it’s hard to replicate the value of a global platform with 50+ million members .)

Peter Shankman, Help A Reporter Out – @skydiver

“We’ll update to let people know where we are and where we’ll be. And the best part is, we won’t have to. 2010 will be the start of the time where our devices do it for us. FourSquare will auto-update our location via GPS, which will tell Twitter, who will add the #fb tag and notify Facebook”

“we’ll start to accept the concept that hey – maybe we really DO only need one social network ,which will bring us to 2011 – the year of the consolidation.”

Brian Sibley, Sibley PR – @bsibley

“Domino’s experience taught us that when it comes to social media, you can’t just switch it on, like you can a traditional marketing tool. You have to invest the time to build a strong following in order to be able to use it as an arrow in your crisis communications quiver when the time comes”

Brian Solis, FutureWorks – @briansolis

“2010 will be the year that we save us from ourselves in social  media…we will stop drinking from the proverbial fire hose and we will lean on filtering and curation to productively guide our experiences and  production and consumption behavior and interaction within each network.”

I’m looking forward to reading 2010 predictions from others.  Thoughts?

Here is a meaning for “Social Search” that is a bit different from the applications that Google, Bing, Facebook and others are racing to perfect.  This one is already available and can be really valuable to entrepreneurs and other professionals.

I have a new friend (who found me on LinkedIn) who is self-funding development of a very interesting new product and Web service.  (A prototype of the product is cellalert.org - but an advanced version is now in development.)  The existing product has received finalist recognition in netsquared and other mobile challenges.  He and his partner (in different cities) are both working full-time in senior level high-tech jobs.   He has received some small funding amounts but will need more in a few months to keep going.   He needs an angel, but not sure how to find one.

My suggestion is to use LinkedIn; and I’ll give some examples below that can help him and maybe others.

From my own experience with social networking platforms, LinkedIn is way better than any other platform for this kind of thing, where a trusted introduction really helps, e.g., for finding partners, investors, donors, advisers, employees, friendly press contacts, etc.   But I would love to hear if others have had good results with other platforms.

OK, how to find an angel:

First example – broad search:

In LinkedIn, click on “Advanced Search” (link to left of quick search box at top of every page).

In the Advanced Search page “Keywords” box, enter “angel investor” (in quotes).

Then under “Location” enter your local zipcode and specify “within 50 miles” (or whatever you want).

Then  scroll down to “Sort by” and choose “Relationship”.  This will show you the people you’re most closely connected to first.

Now press Search.

When I do this for Washington, DC and for my network, I get 44 results, and 11 of those are only 2 degrees away from me (friends of my friends).   (You’ll get different results in different cities and depending on how many and what kind of personal connections you have.)

Second example – broader search

I can start with the same search and widen my net to get more people by entering this in the keywords box:

“Angel investor” OR “early stage investor”
(“OR” has to be in caps) this gives me 50 results, 14 of which are 2 degrees from me.

Third example – narrower search

My friend is especially interested in applications of his product for non-profits, so he would like to find an investor who shares his values.

For this I started by changing the Keyword box to this:

“angel investor” AND (“social entrepreneur” OR “non-profit” OR “social responsibility” OR “socially responsible”)

//Note that you can string phrases together with OR to form concepts, and then you can combine two concepts with an AND.//

This time I got 5 results and 3 are 2 degrees from me, and one is especially interesting because he has done a lot of work with social entrepreneurs  and high-profile non-profit movements.

Now that I’ve found a few interesting people, what’s next?

Start with the best people who are only 2 degrees away from you.  If you want more, add the best people who are 3 degrees away from you and where the person who can introduce you is someone who knows you well enough to especially want to help you.

Now take the person you’ve ranked the highest and send them a message through the person you know who can forward your request or make an introduction.

If the person you want to talk to is only 2 degrees away from you, you can either send your direct contact an email asking them to introduce you, or you can use LinkedIn’s free “Introduction Request” feature.  The introduction request allows you to write a message to the person you want to meet and then also write a short note to your direct contact who can introduce you.

Using LinkedIn’s introduction request feature is especially effective because the person you want to talk to will not only get your message and an introduction from your mutual friend, but they’ll also be able to see your very impressive profile on LinkedIn.

If the person you want to meet is 3 degrees away, the best thing to do is to use LinkedIn’s introduction request feature – making sure to write a compelling message.

However, if your only direct connections to the target person are people you really don’t know that well, then you might be better off using LinkedIn’s “InMail” service – though that requires a paid business subscription to LinkedIn.  (The other methods are free; however, InMails work well, including when the relationships involved aren’t all that strong.)

If anyone has questions about this, feel free to ask here.  Also if you’ve had really good results with other social networking platforms, let us know that too.

Related post:  Social Search and sharing news and ideas.

Social search is on big companies’ minds:
Google’s New Social Search Is A Big Chess Move Against Facebook (ReadWriteWeb, 10/21)

So, Bing has Facebook and Twitter, and Google only has Twitter.

Where is LinkedIn in this conversation?  LinkedIn’s news sharing is worth looking at.  With a few changes it’s potential would be actually greater than either Twitter or Facebook updates.

Why is Twitter so useful?   Because I can choose whom to follow, and others can choose whether to follow me.  But Twitter has big limitations.   Even by creating a selected group of the people I’m following I still have to wade through a lot of non-relevant stuff, and I *mostly* miss a lot of stuff that disappears below the horizon surprisingly quickly – because I look at Twitter at most 2 or 3 times a day, and often go days without looking.   Also, 140 characters is very neat.   But not always appropriate.  It doesn’t really tell me enough in order to decide accurately whether to click through on the links.   And they don’t contain enough info to store and search.

I like LinkedIn News because I can quickly grab content from the Web and share it.  If I want to share it with a particular group or group of connections, this is great.  But something really crucial is missing.

I don’t always want to *push* news and ideas I find interesting to a particular group or set of connections.  And I definitely don’t want to spam all my connections.   I *do* want to be able to collect news and ideas and keep the items in a single place.  And I *do* want to be able to follow/subscribe to collected news and ideas from a selected group of connections and non-connnections.  And I want to also be able to go to a single person’s profile and see what news and ideas that person has collected, or to search my connections for news and ideas that match specific tags.

Those changes would make LinkedIn News much more powerful than either Facebook or Twitter updates – precisely because LinkedIn is much more focused on professional value rather than also flooded with personal messages, photos, etc.  Plus, LinkedIn profiles tell me much more than Twitter bios, and after all, I already have a lot of important connections on LinkedIn.  So LinkedIn’s search capabilities could allow me to find people who share my interests *and* who have impressive profiles and recommendations *and* who are sharing news and ideas from the Web.  This would be doing what LinkedIn does best.

(Continued from Basic Case for Meta Networks and Global Transformation)

Meta Networks are:

• Decentralized networks of people, organizations and networks,
• Bound together by shared goals, values, and experiences.

Meta networks are crucial for fixing global problems before they overwhelm us.

Meta networks need passionate, committed, and talented people, plus ideas, funding, and other resources.   But they also need methods and tools to make the individuals, organizations, and network as a whole more intelligent and effective.

Here are four types of methods and tools that meta networks need:

1.  Connecting people and organizations.

a.  Connecting people to people and organizations to obtain:

- Ideas, expertise and help (employees, partners, consultants, advisors, volunteers)

- Funding (investors, grants, donors)

- Inside Intelligence & Influence (related to potential customers, partners, investors, employees, and suppliers, and agencies, policy makers, communities, etc.)

Examples of tools:
Job, volunteer and consultant matching sites and databases; professional social network platforms for finding needed expertise and affiliations and obtaining trusted recommendations and referrals (e.g., LinkedIn).

Examples of methods:
Network weaving and social network analysis.

b. Connecting people to content
(to obtain news, ideas, opinions, research, experiences, knowledge)

Examples – Generic and specialized Internet search engines, content management and knowledge sharing applications and portals.

2. Sources for Reputation, Fact-checking, Due-Diligence.
(Supports other needs, e.g., connecting people, decision-making, etc.)

Examples:  Generic Internet search engines; professional social network platforms for checking professional experience and getting personally trusted insights and recommendations; reputation sites (most are not very mature yet).

3. Messaging campaigns to spread awareness and actions
(e.g., awareness and actions related to voting, contacting policy makers, talking to neighbors, donating, buying or boycotting)

Examples:  Social media sites and tools (Facebook, Twitter, messaging tools, etc.)

4. Collective Thinking and Action (big category!)

a)  Removing barriers to communication and collaboration.
(Dialogue, listening, finding common ground, consensus-building, conflict transformation, use of stories, symbols and rituals, collective consciousness effects)

b) Identifying, understanding and solving problems
(Collecting facts and perspectives from all relevant sources; Innovating (exploring/scanning/brainstorming); Integrating perspectives to reach consensus/decision on best strategies and tactics; Prediction; Deliberation and planning (evaluating ideas from different perspectives, consensus building); and Getting commitments for action.)

c) Collaborative Action – requiring complex coordination of actions by many people and organizations.

Examples of a, b, & c:   Online and in-person methods and tools for dialogue, deliberation, and collaboration.   For a partial list see NCDD’s Framework for Dialogue and Deliberation.

What is left out of this list?  Or what would you change?

Meta Networks are:

• Decentralized networks of people, organizations and networks,
• Bound together by shared goals, values, and experiences.

Mega organizations (like governments and corporations) are still important.

But the global problems we now face are too great to be solved mainly by hierarchically controlled mega-organizations.

Compared to mega organizations, meta networks are potentially:

• More intelligent and adaptive.
• More accountable,
• Better able to bring about needed shifts in global awareness and behavior.
• Better at distributing ideas, resources and talent to where they are most needed

Global-scale meta networks exist and are enabling great things.

But great as their achievements are, their potential is much greater.

That is, existing meta networks aren’t yet smart and coherent enough to accelerate positive global changes to needed tipping points.   Meta networks are fragmented; and most of the people and organizations in them remain hidden and inaccessible to any given person or organization with a need for more effective connections.

We need to do whatever we can to help meta networks realize their potential.

Next:  What do meta networks need?

See also:  Meta Networks and Global Transformation (March 2009)

Bonnie Myotai Treace, who is a Buddhist priest, and wife of my beloved brother, will be joining a celebration of Thomas Berry’s life today at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.   As part of the celebration she has created a “Water Mala” of 108 hand-made bowls.   A mala is a string of beads as in a rosary, or a garland of flowers.

This site, 108Bowls.org, which is still developing, shows the bowls and explains their significance and how to incorporate them into a practice of caring for water, now in danger on our planet.   The video on the first page, and above, shows how the bowls were made and is set to the music of one of Bonnie’s students, Katheryn Hanz, a very talented singer and guitarist.

A 6/23/09 article in New Scientist reports on “the first evidence that tool use alters the body map.”  That is, researchers have found that a human brain’s internal map of the body is adjusted to account for a tool that extends the body’s reach.  Researchers were excited to note that this means that a transplanted hand or a prosthetic limb would similarly be incorporated into the ‘body map’ inside the brain.  This is an important example of the plasticity of the brain.

What struck me about this article is the implication for collective intelligence and collective consciousness:

The more we use tools that embody collective intelligence, and tools that increase our awareness and use of the perceptions, knowledge and experiences of people in other parts of the world, the bigger and bigger becomes our brains’ “body map” — and “self map”.

As social media are evolving, they are becoming more and more tools for getting things done, visualizing and then solving complex problems, finding answers, getting support we need, etc.   A key is the shift from passive viewing of world events on nightly television news (which had its own expansive effects), to a much more intimate using of collective intelligence, and participating in it.

We are physically evolving into a new species – by rewiring our brains to encompass tools for accessing and using collective intelligence.

The two principles that shine through when collective intelligence becomes collective consciousness are:

The Whole is more than the sum of the parts.

And

The Whole is contained in the parts.

The gradual rewiring of human brains to encompass more and more of the whole species and planet is the physical embodiment of this second principle.

(Confession:  Whenever I write something like this, which I seem to like to do, I often hear an internal chorus of “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but now what?”  The “but now what” is the interesting part.)

How long have I loved thee, dear Human Network?  Let me count the years, since my birth into my loving family, and since my youthful awakening, at age 18, sitting at the feet of Père Pierre, saint of human networks, who wrote again and again about his powerful vision of the planetization of consciousness.

Every person I have loved, appreciated, talked with, liked or disliked, or noticed, has been an experience in the network of consciousness.  It is a network for loving, entertaining, trading, learning, making things and buying them, earning a living, and living.  It is a network for fighting, ha!  Competing, ha!  The network always both wins and loses.  It grows and shrinks, but now mostly grows, grows more and more threatened by its own incoherence, and ever more heartened by its own brilliance, and compassion, and inspired by its search for solutions to its – our — survival and fulfillment.