Season 1, Episode 10: Ever Living Meetings

with Mark McCormack

The Gravity Well podcast delves into complex ideas, making them accessible to all. In this episode, you hear Jenny and Alex dive into round two of their discussions, focusing on key players and relationships in Alberta, particularly in the context of environmental preservation and community engagement. They reflect on a recent meeting with the Big Hill Creek Preservation Society, highlighting the challenges of gravel pit extraction and the lack of regulatory hearings. The conversation then shifts to guest Mark McCormick, who introduces his Ever Living Meetings, a platform for deep, philosophical discussions aimed at resolving societal contradictions through speculative thought. Mark emphasizes the importance of coherence in beliefs and the need for a universal logic to address global crises. The episode explores the intersections of science, religion, and art, and the necessity of conflict acceptance for meaningful dialogue and collaboration.

Welcome and Recap

Alex:

Welcome to The Gravity Well, where we break down heavy ideas into small buckets anyone can handle. In the spirit of Reconcili-action, we seek the wisdom of elders, individuals, and communities that share their knowledge to care for our water, air, land, life and resource needs. A healthy relationship with our homeland and each other is our guide.

Jenny:

Amazing. We have a document pinned at the top of this discussion outlining the beginning of round two. We are here starting round two of the Gravity Well Conversations. Today we are joined by Mark McCormick and I’ll do a good job of introducing you in a minute, Mark. But quickly, I’m just going to go over what we discussed last week. In this round of the conversations, we’re talking about who’s who in the zoo. We want to talk about who are the players that matter in our home in Alberta, the key relationships, what are the goals that each of us has. What are the gaps in our understanding of the goals and what are some alternatives to what we’re trying to do? Last week we met with actually a specific group, the Big Hill Creek Preservation Society concerning some gravel pit extraction that is happening despite much pushback from the neighbours and the preservation society itself in that area.

And it’s a really good example of the powers in play and the decision-making that’s happening in real life. They discussed the regulators not providing hearings necessarily for people to be heard. If there isn’t a hearing, then there isn’t a court case and there isn’t an opportunity for stakeholders to express their concerns. The model that we have is this rock bridge model, and, of course, it’s a 3D model as well, but on one side of it, we’ve put the government and regulator on the other side of it. We’ve put stakeholders and the laws of the land. And we’re also trying to look at, like I said, the relationships and the structure around it. Where we started, we learned a bit last week about who are the players? Stakeholders, government regulators and institutions. And hopefully, we can get some more ideas from Mark on this as well if we have time in this conversation.

And then those relationships, again, are they aligned or are they opposed? And how do we try to find some overarching goals that are shared between us and understand the competing objectives that we’re trying to satisfy in meeting those goals? And then we did talk a lot afterwards with the Polluter Pay Federation about expanding on these key relationships. We were talking about how beliefs come into play. We spoke a lot about religion and how it is playing out in places that are deeply impacted by decisions that are being made in the province, meaning that religion plays a big role in Alberta and that our belief system is being challenged by the changes that we’re seeing. And that is key to understanding in making sure that we can come together in conversation with people, the alternatives while we’re trying to, like I said, bridge those gaps, understand how we can get into collaboration and cooperation and communication with people that would otherwise have different beliefs or potentially have different objectives than us.

Introduction to Mark McCormick and Ever Living Meetings

Jenny:

That’s the beginning of that framework. But we are joined by Mark McCormick and I’ve had the privilege of meeting Mark with one of our earlier guests, Melanie Hoffman introduced him to us. Mark is hosting meetings, they’re called Ever Living Meetings, and it’s based on a philosophy which I’ll let him get into around new world spirits. If you can elaborate on that, once I let you introduce yourself here, Mark, I’m going to offer my view of the meetings and their purpose and then we’ll let Alex offer his reflections as well. And then we’ll let you introduce yourself, Mark, and lead us off with the first, the why of what you’re doing, what you’re doing. My view is that the meetings are a way to get people to come into a conversation where immediately I feel an opportunity to express where I’m coming from and what my beliefs are, where I just mentioned beliefs in the structure.

Jenny:

And one of the questions that was asked in the meeting I attended yesterday was, what is a truth that you live by? I look at this as an opportunity to talk about our relationships first. We often jump into data analysis and decision-making before we look at where people are coming from. And I think that’s one of the key opportunities that I see in the structure of the meetings that you’ve created, Mark. I’m going to stop there. I’m going to let Alex offer a few reflections and then we’ll get into the dialogue. Thanks.

Alex:

Thanks, Jenny. You covered pretty much everything that I would’ve in the reflection. I did get into the math and kind of see how the economic coercion is playing out between gravel pit companies and farmers. And if you factor in taxes and inflation and everything, farmers are only getting about 15 cents per bushel. But if a gravel company comes along and says, Hey, we’ll give you 40 cents a ton, it’s really difficult to convince the farmer that 15 cents a bushel is worth less or worth more than 40 cents a ton, right? The difference is he’s able to grow his crops and continue the water table or exchange his property for a giant gravel pit and a million bucks. It seems like a lot of people are making that decision as opposed to paying all these taxes to maintain the land at a really difficult fight between municipalities, districts and counties, provincial government and the federal government and then corporations to boot, and then all these separate inter agencies that like to get the red tape in the way of getting anything done. It’s a real challenge, but I learned a great deal in that conversation and it was one of the longest ones that we’ve had yet. That’s kind of my takeaway thus far. And this conversation, this is number 10, it’s a good early achievement. With that, I would just like to present you with your time to introduce yourself and your process. Mark, thanks for being here.

Mark:

Feeling blessed to be here. Thank you for inviting me. The message I want to begin with is a bit of an extension of what you two were saying regarding beliefs and how our thoughts shape everything else that we do At the moment, the reason why our situations seem to be deteriorating everywhere is because those frameworks aren’t incoherence enough to have agreement on what the truth is. And if you can’t have an agreement, you can’t have any currency of actual development. All the resources that we have can’t be utilized or fashioned into any good or service unless people agree to do it. If you agree to do it yourself, you’ll go do it and believe in your values. But if you have other people that you’re trying to convince to do it, or if it’s a large enough task that requires more than yourself, then agreement is everything.

You can’t move a piece of dirt through somebody else’s hands if they don’t agree with you. And this, a brilliant economist was saying that before me, but I feel like the approach we’re taking hits the root of the problem to those who appear to be more practical-minded. These root foundational beginnings don’t have any immediate practical value. It takes too long to build these frameworks of agreements. We’re in a crisis right now, and some say with AI, we have less than six months if we don’t get that under control. There are a lot of things that artificial intelligence can do to the agreement frameworks that could divide us even further and make it impossible to address things like climate change. I have to sell this idea that in the beginning, we start slow. It feels excruciatingly slow because the crisis, the poly crisis, this meta crisis, this mega-crisis is not just increasing but it’s accelerating.

The systems are compounding off of each other, and the environment itself is a complex system which also is hitting tipping points that might not be reversible. When we start with this language problem, this ideology problem, this thought problem, it feels like we’re not making progress in proportion to those changes. But just like the problem, if we start at the root, we develop a coherence advantage that starts to exponentially increase and we get this compounding effect that will surprise people. And that compounding effect in religious terms or even artistic terms is called spirit. It is this incredible power latent within human beings that if we increase our coherence and our agreement structures around a new foundation of truth, we can access this kind of spirit within ourselves, but also within our communities and our global community that can have the power to address these monumental challenges. I hope to bring in an array of light with this approach.

Jenny:

Amazing. You and I have noted that we have a lot of alignment in the effort of this room and what you’re trying to do. Of course, we’re taking different approaches. I’ll just offer one of the thought processes I had last year. A similar sense of urgency as you described. Mark, I know you said you feel this six-month horizon. I certainly feel 2024 is a pivotal year for not only our understanding but also our need to come together with solutions. I’m grateful that we’re both exploring this work together. One of the comments or concepts that I put forward when I was door-knocking last year, I ran in the election trying to appreciate that this is a governance issue. Governance is one component, as well. At the time I think we had 26 ministries. I was suggesting that each of these ministries should be aligned towards the same goals I pictured like a zipper.

If they’re all aligned, then we can all close the gaps between all of these different ministries and make sure that there isn’t any waste and any loss of resources or time or goals or distraction in between those things. When I look at the structure of how you’re building this framework of conversation, you did it based on a similar approach. If I can say, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, which is to align philosophical departments, if you will, towards this as you said, this universal truth. And maybe you can expound on what you mean by that. But is that a fair assessment assumption of how you approached the structure of your meetings and the idea of trying to bring alignment among us?

Mark:

The zipper approach is an interesting one, yes. Lining up so that we flow in this universal kind of thinking, this universal. And if we do that, we can get this resonance occurring where our differences stop conflicting and they start complimenting. And this approach has been tried in almost every diplomatic circle from the United Nations through kindergarten, we’ve been talking about this type of solution forever. Right from the Ancient Greeks, even before that, in some ways, our masters of wisdom knew these things. Then why are we here thousands of years later having the same problem? And it’s because the way that we’re approaching this sense-making agreement structure is at the current time not grounded enough. It’s not clear enough to solve the deeper contradictions that are underlying the decisions. Contradictions between science and religion might not seem like it’s playing a role, a large role or even one of the most foundational roles in deciding what to pay for a bushel of farm goods or if you should take what a mining company is giving you or some kind of infrastructure program.

But it does, these foundational contradictions are dividing millions of people. They’re large, that’s why they’re hard to identify. Even though we know about them in the media and our practical decisions, they don’t seem like they’re coming into play in a stronger way than our immediate sensuous or immediate sense data would allow us to change our behaviors with we seem like creatures of habit. We seem high creatures of reaction, and to a certain degree, we are. But deep within our consciousness are these problems that have not been solved in human history before. And the way that we’re conventionally going about it like today is not any better. We’re a little bit more lost than we were I would say, than 250 years ago. And the internet and the information explosion that’s occurring is making the problem vastly more difficult to solve. This is where we come in with this universal logic, which is an increase in that coherence in proportion to the abundance of what we call particular information.

Universal, particular individual, these are very high-level categories that we don’t ordinarily think about but are also foundational to almost any decision or conceptualization that we use. We want to bring this in not as any type of knowledge that adds in an additive way to this information explosion, but it’s almost like a clarifying that ephemeral realizes it does more with less. And that’s because it cuts through the noise and gets to the heart of things. And that’s what we call wisdom. I feel like yes, we’re aligned in that approach and I’m very excited to see if we can get that clarity in your processes as well as all the other groups that you’re bringing together so that we can fit them together. Kind of like that zipper that circles back around and zips itself up. There’s a circularity to the wisdom that is also missing, particularly in scientific knowledge that I think could have some incredible quick wins in reorganizing these ministries, reorganizing businesses, reorganizing how the sectors of society work together.

Jenny:

Thank you for reminding or bringing that into the conversation. Thank you, Mark, for joining us, Mark McCormick. This is Mark Doran. He’s a collaborator of ours. He’s a part of the Polluter Pay Federation supporting landowners and stakeholders in terms of rights and laws that would help ensure that our safety and the safety of the future of the province are being looked after. Mark has been a tremendous ally and glad you’re here. Mark, you’re welcome to join the conversation at any point you’d like. The opportunity we see in having this conversation is to try and bring some of those principles into this discussion. As we go through this hour, we’re going to try and use some of your principles in this just as a test piece. Let’s talk a little bit about the guiding principles if you don’t mind. I don’t know if Alex if you want to take this one.

The principles behind ELMx is based on Dialectical Behavioral Therapy

Alex:

Sure. As we talked about when I went to the first meeting with you, I found the foundational principle behind the method that you are using, which is dialectical behavioural therapy. It’s about understanding how language fits into the mix and understanding how to adjust the framework to accept difficult truths in life using language and logic so that it can fit into its proper functions in life. The first function was enhancing capabilities. The second function was generalizing capabilities. The third function, improving motivation and reducing dysfunctional behaviors function four, enhancing and maintaining capabilities function five, structuring the environment. Those are the five primary functions of what I found in what you were so graciously sharing with me in that meeting. And I was wondering maybe if you could elaborate a little bit more on how those five functions apply in your program.

Mark:

Absolutely. Thank you for that. When we’re organizing our concepts in some ways, if you think about it, organize organism origin, to be clear on how we get to these enhanced capabilities, structuring the environment, getting past this function, we have to be clear on what boundaries are. We have to be clear on what objects are and what their natures are. And at the moment we don’t have a universal foundation for that. It feels like everything is a lot more separate than it is. Instead of having this inner unity, this inner understanding is like a heuristic that permeates all things. We have rote memorization going on, and rope memorization is where we just use our cognitive horsepower to take objects that don’t seem linked and we put them in a contingent or an order that’s determined by us, not by the nature of the truth of the object itself.

And heuristics is supposed to be a natural way of bringing together objects that just make sense together and that sense-making. There is a natural version here in reality itself and science is touching upon ancient wisdom traditions, but today we see them as separate. We see that wisdom of the past of nomadic tribes, of Indigenous wisdom, all those, ancient Egyptian wisdom, ISTs, all that spiritual knowledge seems to be separate now from the sense-making of objectivity that science has taken the primary voice of. But there’s a certain limit to the way we’re doing science right now that it is approximating some degree of wisdom, but it’s doing it in a dysfunctional way, a broken way, and it’s leading to these contradictions even within our best scientific models, whether it’s physics, chemistry, biology, even within our interpretations of art and peacemaking diplomacy, there are these contradictions that we have not solved. And to address the problems that our species is facing now, we have to rise to that level and solve them.

Jenny:

Mark, when you say contradictions, can you offer a specific example by any chance?

Mark:

The three most concrete understandable ones, if you’re not coming from this universal logic that is also pragmatically affecting the political environment the most, are that if we saw these three contradictions immediately or focused upon them, it would have the quickest wins. The win-win wins would come from these three, even if people don’t grasp this root universal logic. The first contradiction that would be great to solve is between men and women. Voting trends are even showing that there’s a divergence that’s occurring. There’s a huge crisis and the data so far showing this problem is getting worse. The second contradiction is where we have capitalism and socialism or communism as ideological modes of political economy. And then the third one I already mentioned was between science and religion or even art in religion and science. These categories are in tension with each other.

They seem like they’re not congruent or they’re dysfunctional and there are wise elders. There are spiritual masters or interfaith groups even in the United Nations that know somehow there are principles within these diverse modes of science and religion and art and capitalism and socialism and communism and male and female and L-G-B-T-Q and non-binary, all these diverse modes have some kind of inner resonance where they can compliment each other, they can belong together instead of acting dysfunctional towards each other in these modes of resistance that reduces our capability of working together and agreeing on a course of action, especially in an emergency. And so those three, I think divide billions of people. But the problem with starting there is that they’re packed with roughly 198 other contradictions in their definitions. To even get clarity on their boundaries requires a great deal of sense-making in terms of our language, but also in terms of our grammar.

And then that is grounded upon logic. And we don’t normally think of it that way because we don’t even really know what logic is. Even science doesn’t know what science is. It has a methodology that seems to approximate truth and it just seems to work well enough that it builds the societies that we have what we think are better societies. But we’ve reached the limit of that model where now it seems like we’re creating a lot more dysfunction rather than enhancing a critical part of human experience, which is this inner intimacy, this feeling of being human and not being a mechanical cog in the wheel and some kind of unstoppable machine. To define logic properly, we have to break out of the ordinary thinking of science and into what’s called speculative thought. It is a philosophical state of mind, but even philosophy is not well understood.

When I say philosophy, I don’t mean conventional philosophy, what we would call conventional philosophy is abstract science or abstract philosophy or fragmented dualistic consciousness and real, genuine philosophy is this coming together in a genuine reasoning process that we call speculative thought and that thinking, that way of thinking is this truth making that is missing and is required to understand scientifically but also artistically, also religiously, also in a capitalistic sense, in a common sense, in a socialist sense, in a male sense, in a female sense in an L-G-B-T-Q sense, in a non-binary sense or non-dualistic sense and a dualistic sense, all these modes of understanding what logic is coming from this speculative way of thinking about knowledge as circular as self-grounding, whereas conventional science would avoid that we’re trying to linearize and put into sequence our meaning so they’re clear. But what we’re sacrificing for that clarity is the truth of reality.

That is wisdom. Universal logic might not initially seem like the solution to these quick wins, what we would call transcending contradictions, but it will, if you try and solve those three massive contradictions between men, women, capitalism, communism and art, science, religion, it will lead you into a rabbit hole, which the United Nations in any sense-making process eventually ends up into where even if you get close to the truth and you’re earnestly trying to solve these problems, these contradictions and get the clarity, you end up going in circles, but not the good circles, the bad circles. And that’s where I feel like we can come in and have some quick wins, even at the foundational level that will shake these higher conceptualizations and start building real resonance deep enough to take action together and trust each other across demographics. Those are a couple of examples we could try and get into them.

Alex:

No, I think that’s fascinating, Mark. There’s a lot to unpack in with what you just said, but I did notice one commonality, one common agreeable between our science, religion, spirituality, and the wisdom of the elders is most of them were based on exploration and discovery and an acceptance of the unknown. It’s almost like the nightlight in the darkness and language, an interesting model. But I think where science has, as you touched on, gone awry, it’s no longer exploring and discovering it’s categorizing and compartmentalizing itself into a streamline which just isn’t the right approach to science. It’s not the right approach to spirituality. It’s not the right approach to life because love doesn’t fit in an ice cube tray. I like to say we can’t compartmentalize ourselves into wisdom. We just muddy the waters too much. And what we need is that new clear clarity, that clear vision, so to speak, for everyone, to be willing to just let go and accept those universal truths about life that we can just accept instead of just ripping everything apart to develop technology so we don’t have to face death because that’s also a part of life which a lot of cultures have difficulty accepting, but they ultimately everyone does.

I think it sounds very interesting. I notice a lot of different contradictions in my own life, but maybe in future conversations it would be interesting to touch on some of the other ones. I’ll pass it back to Jenny and maybe see what she has to think.

Who does the ELMx team want in these exploratory conversations?

Jenny:

Yeah, thanks. I think that was great. I’m going to let that linger. Who would you want in these conversations? Like you said you were doing this speculative thought process, who needs to be there?

Mark:

That’s a great question. For those who can enhance the capability and help us structure the environment so that we’re conducive to this speculative wisdom where these nebulous concepts like love are clear, but in that clarity we’re not truncating them into oppressive little units that don’t fit or aren’t congruent with this absolute kind of truth that we feel about them. These high level words seem to be inherently untouchable in a way by human corruption. You can’t seem to corrupt them or shouldn’t try to corrupt them in their purity from our own confusions, our own limitations. But this is where the wakefulness of the speculative method shows that humans are capable of absolute cognition. We are capable of grasping the absolute truth even while we’re finite and these absolute notions of truth like love, spirit, even nature, we’re not even really sure where nature comes from.

We had a big bang, we don’t know where that came from. These kinds of nebulous concepts can be touched upon in their heart of truth and we can say what they are because we can ground them now on a single thought, which is the foundation that gives them that context. That puts all the other words in a sense, making in a structured environment of meaning-making that is objectively true and that we can catch ourselves distorting it because of the coherence and the correspondence models of truth that science uses or using those as well in this universal logic, in this structuring of meaning. But we’re using them in their absolute modes and their absolutely clear definitions, and that sounds impossible at first, but there were a couple of philosophers that started this and it makes a lot more sense. It makes sense of the contradictions that we’re currently facing, and we’re just bringing these back into consciousness with people that are conducive to it. They’ve already had a lot of inner work, a lot of cultured-ness has gone into them in terms of overcoming their own limitations.

Alex:

By chance. Do you know the names of the philosophers?

Mark:

Hegel for me is probably the clearest in the scientific mode. But in terms of religion, there are plenty of religious scholars of the past that were pretty clear across all the religions in terms of ancient Greece. Aristotle was also in the right direction of this speculative thought. Then of course he was inspired by Plato, Socrates, the Presocratic, and Hermetics. Then that leads off into older religions, Judaism and then ancient Egyptian mythology and ritual, and then of course indigenous wisdom and Mandic wisdom. These are the sources that we’re drawing upon, but within those sources are around 133 other ideologies, but it’s technically infinite. But those are the ones we go to put into scientific form for our generation, our epoch in terms of people that would be conducive to those modes. At the moment it seems like there are around 137, but it’s a bit unwieldy.

We’re trying an experiment where we have these tribes, we’re calling them wise vibe tribes, and they’re based on this notion of universal logic that is the highest container that we can have in terms of trying to make this structured environment of meaning. These “wise vibe” tribes are organized into six plus a seventh, which is unstructured. Somebody’s feeling too restricted. They can go into tribe seven and try and rebuild their own system from scratch, but it’s the comparison of these notional systems. That is where the magic is when human beings come together, sharpen each other, they invited into reconciliation, creating space for allowing the contradictions to be seen, radical authenticity to show who we are and what we’re grappling with and what the limits are in our systems and our words. And then underneath those are the concepts that are in contradiction.

And then putting those into wakefulness is what logic is. It’s a necessity between the concepts that we’re trying to adhere to and the infinite becoming of the finite universe. These types of tribes cover every type of human being on the planet, but it’s doing it in a way where we’re touching upon this universal truth and it’s based on three universal thoughts of spirit, nature and logic which are nebulous in our current culture. They seem useless, but the way that we define them in terms of these 200 structured contradictions, they complement each other. With the complementarities inherent within an ordering of those three words, people who are a little bit more analytical might like this approach. First even intuitive types, feelers, empaths, and even psychics, starting to recognize that their truth is also present in speculative thinking. We’re already uniting another contradiction between thinkers and feelers.

We’re bringing those into harmony as we try to define these three top-level words and we try and order them. These wise vibe tribes are based on how people order those words in terms of six combinations, and that’s all the combinations. These concepts are truly universal either in every conversation straight from you deciding what to sell on your farm or whether to the United Nations deciding on how to bring faith together and save humanity in these geopolitical wars. It’s an encompassing container where we can take all of our dysfunction divided in. It’s not even just a safe space. We call it a transcendental space because allowing that authenticity in including mental illness, including the worst dysfunctions that we, all of them are just these inner contradictions and we’re pathologizing them at a faster and faster rate in our current finite psychiatric and mental health system.

These three words as we invite in all this dysfunction will help clarify the other 200 nested contradictions within those definitions. As we try to unpack them, we have a conversation that drills down to the roots and finds these quick-win contradictions between more salient terms like male | female, capitalism | socialism | communism, or art and religion. In trying to define logic, nature, and spirit, those concepts will come to the fore as we get more and more practical about our everyday conflicts. We have this beautiful mixing even between the contradiction of practical thinking, practical matters, and theoretical matters. Just having a conversation doesn’t sound like it’s the solution, but when we invite in the dysfunction, it enhances the capability as long as the container is in the right way and in that universality so that the structure doesn’t become oppressive. It is in that sweet spot between complexity and simplicity where we know the right way to have the conversation.

That is wisdom. Individuals who are in that emotional empath mode or in that analytical mode that understands speculative thought through a lot of self-work will be the first ones to have the emotional resilience to endure this kind of new structure. It’s a brilliant signal to think outside the box here or else we’re just going to be contributing to the problem. But when you think outside the box, you have to integrate, you have to do some real work. The individuals who are ready to do that work, who recognize that we are in an existential crisis will have that foundational trait. We find that leaders who have those two traits and this speculative nascent work will be conducive to bringing in, first of all, radical honesty so we can get the contradictions out and actually see the real problem and then have the emotional resilience to work through that in this new kind of structuring of meaning that will and we’re finding is already enhancing the conversations to make leaps and bounds where the United Nations or other development, I would say reconciliation processes stagnate and end up in those circles that don’t go anywhere.

That’s where I feel like individuals who are ready for that kind of conversation will feel at first. It’s not moving fast enough, but what’s happening is universes of meaning are coming into coherence and it feels like we’re pulling icebergs like we’re swirling huge continents, architectonic plates of meaning, and it starts slowly, so much inertia in the wrong direction of our culture that we’re going to have to go against the grain a little bit at first and experience that tension. But if we can get over that initial moment, that inertia will eventually start to move in the right direction and then start to pick up speed in that compounding way I mentioned earlier. We’re inviting everybody, but the people who are ready for this level in the pure form of universal logic are those types of people. But we have also translated it into a narrative form for people who are perhaps more trapped in what we call sensuous consciousness.

In that immediacy of the five senses of a finite life, of just trying to survive the desperation, the rat race, addictions, drugs, sex pornography, the beauty industry, the celebrity industry, the tabloids, all these types of, it’s like sugar for the soul in a way. It’s not good for you, but it initially tastes good. We’re trying to get this universal logic into a narrative form and storytelling because ordinary consciousness needs that at first to evolve into these higher modes of introspection so that they have that emotional resilience to do the work. By having this sharing going on, everybody needs to be heard on some level. This sharing is a catharsis that opens up the mind to take in new ideas and to be open and to feel safe and to feel strong and to feel appreciated in what their lived experience is so that they can eventually join those who’ve had that privilege already to have those experiences of self-development and self-actualization. No matter who you are, we’re trying to develop the process truly, universally to reach everyone, whether it’s our leaders or those who are being crushed by society in marginalized communities. That’s how we’re taking this strategic approach to find where everybody fits in their truth and to get clarity on that truth in a way where people feel like they’re loved and that they belong.

Jenny:

Amazing. I want to reflect on a couple of things. First of all, I’m going to use some practical words here. Like you said, Mark, it’s helpful for perhaps a broader audience to talk about practicality. In the last meeting, I was in, we worked through, as Mark was saying, we start with this idea where we identify ourselves. We talk about things like how we’re feeling, what’s a source of truth for us, a word to describe ourselves, and one absolute thing we want people to know about. You call it a personal story. I was thinking last night that if you change the word joke to something funny, you get me back in. Some way to just talk about our truth in terms of humour. And anyway, then we did this exercise as Mark was describing, where we are simply just taking those three words, spirit, nature, and logic.

And as he has described, he’s broken that up into six different groups. Basically, he’s offered an order in which those occur, and maybe you can expand on those buckets, but for me, I’ll just use myself as an example. My initial gut was, oh, we need spirit first because we are people and we are representing this problem and well, we are the problem, but we are there and we’re present. And then we have, to me, nature is something that we’ve been ignoring, we need to do that. And logic, like you said, is to me it’s a word that what does it mean? I think it comes after we establish those things. But then when I reflected on it, again, part of my concern, and I love the fact that you’ve got kind of three things that you’re talking about, is this sense of I feel we want stability.

We’ve been aiming for balance. This is again my words, not yours, and rather we need stability. And that’s where three things come into play for me, and now I’m looking at this problem as if it’s something that needs to be balanced. You’ve talked about how we need to not just make decisions, but rather we are facing dilemmas and we need to be able to balance challenges. I’ve now put myself in this seventh bucket that Mark has provided this space where I’m not clear on where my view of this site, but the action of doing this, as I’ve discovered and I’ve been to five of these meetings now, is we’ve realized as a group that we don’t know what the words mean necessarily. And I’m one that’s very loose with definitions of words. I’m probably contributing to that speculative thought process for that reason because I’m not hung up on what precise words mean necessarily, but rather the feeling that they leave me.

When we did a source of truth, that was how we fed into not only these three concepts of spirit, logic and nature but where does our truth lie within those things? Now this is a second layer that Mark has added to this equation, which is, I’ll be specific. Mine is love wins. That’s my “universal truth” that I use to guide what I’m doing. Abundance is the way forward. That’s my truth. Mark asked, well, where do you put that? And that was one of my reflections last night when I was reflecting on the meeting. I did say it should be in everything, but I’m also wondering if there isn’t. I’ve lost my train of thought here, but it just helped me. Oh, go ahead Alex.

Alex:

Sometimes when you just let go for a second, the thought comes back. It’s like when you walk into the kitchen you think, “What was I here for?” And then you walk back to the dining room and you think, “Oh yeah”, the same type of thing. I like how you touched, <write it down>, Mark. It was interesting how you were talking about certain people’s character traits and immediately I wanted to jump in, but you were on a good train and ask you what your Myers-Briggs is because mine is one of the reasons why I find I’m discomfort uncomfortable sometimes when I’m in the outside world or perceiving the outside world is my Myers-Briggs pretty much explains my personality or my perceptual type. I’m an extroverted intuitive feeling, perceiving I’m intuitive to the world around me, and I feel it as I perceive it all at the same time, which pretty much explains my anxieties and things like that because it’s like, what is going on?

Why am I feeling this way? There are unicorns and butterflies and it just feels like the other shoe’s going to drop or the bombs are going to fall or what is going on. And it’s not my feeling, it’s the people around me, whatever they’re going through. As you mentioned also the tabloids and things that make me feel personally responsible for the behaviors of other people on the other side of the planet. And then I feel helpless because nothing that I can do about it. Then that’s when I go into the introspection, the self-introspection, and then I have to find ways to kind of and find ways to program myself to move through that and accept it as a part of another layer of truth that I’m experiencing in the world. And it’s a lot of work, as you said, it is a lot of work to do it, and I’m glad that you formed this group and that other people are trying to learn how to do the same things. I think it’s valuable. I mean, I’m going to ruminate on it overnight and never know something might pop into my head at three in the morning, which it usually does.

How can we use ELMx meetings to work through conflicts within Alberta’s power structure?

Jenny:

The other truth that I brought into the meeting yesterday was “conflict avoidance”. The new word that came up for me last night is conflict acceptance. The people that you want to participate in this room are the ones that are accepting that we have to get past the initial threat of challenging conversation because we have a greater purpose, a greater problem that we need to serve. The opportunity I’m seeing now from our conversation yesterday is friction. As you said, science is not perfect, right? Friction is always that unknown piece of physics that we struggle to quantify, and I think that is the opportunity in those conversations you’re having is to embrace the friction. We’re tied against the hour for you here, but in terms of this ask, we’re at this who’s who in the zoo, and we’ve got this model, can you walk through how you would approach having a conversation, and we shared this model with you and the image of the rocks and how we’ve structured the people and the organizations in it. How would you use this in one of your discussions if you wanted this to be a topic of conversation, how would you carry it out so that you can get this speculative thought process happening?

Mark:

I’m trying to go off to one of these ever-living meetings right after this, and I feel like to answer this question is to invite in and clarify where people are in terms of how they see the world. First off these big contradictions like between spirit, nature, and logic are often in contradiction as well, but also those well down into trying to put people or trying to have people put themselves into those male-female L-G-B-T-Q, non-binary into the capitalist socialist, communist into the art, religion, science buckets. You could say maybe these little gravity buckets that make a load of sense-making easier. Our traditional models that work the best so far that governments use because they’re somewhat stable even though they’re not perfect, such as the Myers-Briggs that Alexander mentioned, or even oceans or the KAS test, and there’s one woman named Deepak who has one that nobody talks about with 240 questions.

These are also just operating by speculative thought in a confused form, in a fragmented form where Myers-Briggs is one of the simplest, and it hits something about the essence of being human. These four opposite pairs between introverted, extroverted, intuitive, or sensor or a feeler or thinker or judger or perceiver. Those are the four categories in the H total concepts that Myers Briggs uses to structure people into these 16 personality types. They are also just contradictions that are alternating if you think about it. When you start to look at what tension is and how to clarify confusion through the tension, and you invite that in, as you said, Jenny, instead of conflict avoidance, you have conflict acceptance for this reconciliation process. You’re doing it by accident, this speculative thought. But when you’re seeing clearly what’s happening to you is when you’re looking at reality as an object separate from yourself, even that as a contradiction with your own cognition because you see yourself as self and other.

Everything is a contradiction. Everything including the sense-making itself is just contradiction moving itself, and we call that consciousness, and this guy named Hegel calls it the notion, when you see the world through the eyes of the notion, which is the eyes of truth or the eyes of wisdom, your thinking is transmuted into this conflict structure, into a coherent to flow and this natural flowing. This is what we call reason, reason, that is in a mode of epiphany and makes sense. When you see things that are incongruent with your reality, even if it’s you in the world itself, which a lot of us are feeling like we don’t belong in this world, that seems to be collapsing on itself. There’s a tension there that you can look at as a contradiction or as something that’s not congruent with yourself or your model of the universe, or if you see it through the notion, through the fact that all this diversity is a structure of belonging that you can parse into these opposite pairs, in fact, 200 of them that are themselves in a circle in a zipper of coherence.

Then when you’re projecting that meaning onto the world and the world is giving it back to you through sense data, it starts to align. And when things align, this alignment process is what transmutes that conflict avoidance, that fear of difference, that fear of the unknown, that fear of the other. It transmutes that into a self that you recognize as a part of yourself, and that’s what love is to start defining that term. That’s how universal logic starts to define it, it’s a recognition process that happens in consciousness when you begin to glimpse the notion of who you are and that the notion of the universe is a reflection of yourself and yourself is a reflection of it. These universal laws are categories that are currently not being seen correctly by human beings, and it is causing us to operate in an unwise mode where that zipper is coming apart more and more because we’re not embracing how they’re supposed to mesh together.

Mark:

We’re seeing that they’re opposites, and then we’re running away from each other. That’s why I feel like the love wins and your action towards embracing sense-making in this conflict. Acceptance directly fits in with this speculative thought and this universal wisdom that we’re trying to bring in as well. And it’s a nice moment that I think all leaders to some degree have because to have conflict acceptance, you have to have a certain degree of emotional resilience and space-making for that. As people trust this process, this speculative process of wisdom in this universal logic with very simple categories, it starts to create a sense of safety that it’s okay to do this and start trusting not just each other, but we start trusting the process. We start trusting the way and that way becomes the truth. This sense of a real organism, a living organism where we’re together as organs of some greater whole and each one of us is essential. This feeling is what we want. This is what love is, this is what flow states are, this greater sense of self that we can bring into action and create the kind of world that we want in a higher spirit of who we are. In that clarity and in that circular zipper that completes itself. I feel like that’s why we’re complimentary.

Jenny:

A hundred per cent. Oh, this has been amazing. I see we’re at seven and I know you have your meeting. We’re going to let you rock and roll today, Mark, but I’m going to be back in that space and figuring out ways to bring this back together for you. I did want to plant one seed with you before you leave, which is Reuben Nelson. We interviewed or I interviewed back in February. He said that nobody else is doing this work, I’m going to share this episode with him and let him know that this is new. Like you said, this isn’t happening anywhere else, and I think this is cool. I’m going to send you a two-minute clip from his thing, which I think will inspire you because it was pretty remarkable to hear him say that. I think this work is happening somewhere, but now I can validate that for him. Anyway, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your evening. Go ahead, Alex.

Alex:

Yeah. Thanks again, Mark. Have a great night.

Mark:

Thanks guys. I feel like it’s synchronicity and destiny. Can’t wait to meet ’em. Thank you so much for this and take care of yourselves. Keep sublating.

Jenny:

Same with you. See you soon, Mark. Thank you. Bye. Bye.

Follow-up: I attended at least eight ELMx meetings. At first, the process was welcoming, open, dynamic and collaborative. The process was fun and hearing others’ interpretations was mentally stimulating. Mark and the ELMx team are committed to the process and are operating with the best intentions. There are kind and brilliant minds contributing to this work. However, it was decided the approach should be intentionally competitive. I no longer felt the process was accepting of my truth that you need to move away from winning or losing thinking, and rather accept win-win strategies. Always incorporating different views on the approach and style for creating a shared vision of success.

Who’s Who in the Zoo Analysis

Players outlined in this conversation: philosophical departments (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine Economics, Literature, and Peace), the United Nations, religion, Indigenous, and nature.

Players absent: the general public and the disenfranchised.

Results: with the advent of the internet and AI, the risks of missing key players, and people directly impacted by poor decision-making in leadership are at risk of being overlooked.