METAPHORS
 
 
What is a Metaphor?   
Why is Metaphor Important in Systemic Change and Learning?  
References on metaphor 
Metaphors of Dominant World Views AND Paradigm Shifts
 
A) WHAT IS METAPHOR? 
 

1. A figure of speech in which a term is transferred from the object it ordinarily designates to an object it may designate only by comparison or analogy, as in the phrase "evening of life". 2. Figurative language; allegory or parable: the prophets used much by metaphors to set forth truth. Bunyan. -- American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 

Metaphor describes the relationship between two unlike objects, ideas of situations. For example, "life is a roller coaster, full of ups and downs, is a metaphor. -- Carole Cooper with Julie Boyd, Mindful Learning, 1996  

A metaphor calls a thing something it isn't life is a bowl for of cherries, Metaphors are not logical, but they create an image that can challenge what is blindly accepted, allow new links to develop and generate new ways of thinking. Metaphors are a way of understanding a situation you are a part of and helped create. They give a new language, a more poetic, less scientific language, for discussion of life. -- H. B Gellat, Creative Decision-Making  

"When people say it's "just a metaphor," we really have to look at that because all science is metaphor. When you say that nature is an array of mechanisms, that's absolutely as metaphorical as saying it's a living entity. There is no way of talking about anything new without invoking metaphors. All of science is based on metaphor. If you talk about an atom as a little solar system with planets around it, or as whirlpools of energy, in the more recent descriptions, these are all metaphors. Metaphor simply means that "you take something that is familiar to you and use it as a pictograph or an image of what you are trying to describe that you don't yet understand well." -- Elisabet Sahtouris 
http://www.west.net/~insight/elsa.htm   

"The fact is that when you work with body and mind, or you've been forced to because you've been ill, you find that the connector is metaphor. Metaphor is the language of the soul. Shakespeare talks in metaphors, the Bible talks in metaphors. Metaphor is a physical picture of a spiritual condition." -- Marion Woodman--  
http://www.now.com/issues/15/42/Ent/cover.html 
 
   

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B) WHY IS THE USE OF METAPHOR IMPORTANT IN UNDERSTANDING SYSTEMIC CHANGE and SYSTEMIC LEARNING?   
 

"Images and metaphors are not only interpretive constructs or ways of seeing, they also provide frameworks for action. Their use creates insights that often allow us to act in ways that we may not have thought possible before" -- Gareth Morgan--  

"Metaphor is a linguistic label or symbol directly given or transferred to some object, person or thing. But the label is different from the thing, even though it seems analogous to it n many potential ways. ... The metaphor serves to catalyze the imagination; it is image provoking. The analog is seductive; it tantalizes one into believing , even if temporarily, that the metaphor is the thing. Various images provoked by the metaphor and the analogous characteristics implied between the label and the thing provide much food for thought that can be harnessed for personal reflection as well as group discussion. Although metaphor is much of the life-blood of artistic and literary forms, metaphors are widely used in everyday conversation. But it is the disciplined use of metaphor as a methodological device in small group activities that reveals its promise for facilitating the conversation of systemic change in education. " -- Arne Collen, Educational Technology, Jan-Feb, 1996--  

"The metaphor --- a figure of speech used to indicate resemblance--has become a common tool in systems teaching and research. Merali and Martin (1994) have provided a valuable commentary on the metaphor's role and on the characteristics which influence its usefulness. They suggest firstly, that a metaphor has to be culturally and linguistically appropriate, and also possess structure, depth and richness with an appropriate degree of familiarity and referencing for the intended purpose. Limitations are also pointed out, including what is described as reification (taking metaphor too literally); distraction; distortion; manipulation; and disfunctionality (applying a metaphor when it is culturally inappropriate). The criteria Merali and Martin suggest for examining metaphors are by their nature value-laden, and exploration of these criteria would be linked to the human or social sciences." -- Gordon Dyer, Educational Technology/JanFeb, 1996----   

"The metaphorical mode of teaching is holistic; it constantly focuses on the processes of recognizing and understanding patterns and general principles which give meaning to specific facts. Each unit is no longer an isolated set of information but an opportunity to make new connections, to gain insight into both the new subject and that which is already known.......Learning has a sense of integration when the emphasis is on seeing relationships; it is both more efficient and more satisfying." ... -- Linda Verlee Williams, 1983  

".... Metaphors, similes and analogies are all short story forms that can twist the learner's thinking to a new revelation or dimension. They can be used to clarify, link ideas and to persuade others. Most often, they paint vivid pictures in the learners mind that involve the learner in the context of the story or illustration. The right metaphor or story is much more powerful than the words and storyline; it develops a relationship of meaning between learning and context. What is critical to learning is developing appropriate metaphors, because they do colour how the learner sees the situation and then influences his/her corresponding actions." --Cooper, Carole with Julie Boyd, 1996   

"Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories." -- Mary Catherine Bateson, 1994 --  

"Metaphors are what thought is all about. We use metaphor consciously or unconsciously, all the time, so it is a matter of mental hygiene to take responsibility for these metaphors, to look at them carefully, to see how meanings slide form one to the other. Any metaphor is double-sided .. offering both new insight and new confusion. The solution is to take responsibility for the choice of metaphors, to savor them and ponder their suggestions. Above all to live with many and take no one metaphor as absolute. A metaphor goes on generating ideas and question, so that a metaphorical approach to the world is endlessly fertile and involves constant learning. A good metaphor continues to instruct. -- Mary Catherine Bateson, 1994--  

Gareth Morgan .... "argues that metaphors are an important tool of systemic thinking and that metaphors between physical organisms and social systems have produced new theories and practical implications for understanding social systems." -- Larry Hutchins, 1996-- 

"Metaphors are not logical, but they create an image that can challenge what is blindly accepted, allow new links to develop and generate new ways of thinking. Metaphors are a way of understanding a situation you are a part of and helped create. They give a new language, a more poetic, less scientific language, for discussion of life." -- H.B. Gellatt, Creative Decision Making---  

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C) REFERENCES ON METAPHOR  

Bateson, Mary Catherson. 1994. Peripheral Visions: Learning along the Way. New York: Harper Collins.  

The Chaordic Handbook- Living, Learning and Organizing on the Edge of Chaos. http://www.funderstanding.com/mailing1.htm  

Collen, Arne. Reflection and Metaphor in Conversation. Educational Technology / January-February 1996.  

Cooper, Carole and Julie Boyd. 1996. Mindful Learning. Australia: Global Learning Communities.  

Dyer, Gordon. Enthalpy: A Metaphor for a Design Guide for Conversations. Educational Technology/January-February, 1996.  

Hutchins, Larry. 1996. Systemic Thinking: Solving Complex Problems. Colorado: Professional Development Systems.  

Gellat, H. B.. 1991. Creative Decision Making: Using Rational and Intuitive Techniques to Make the Best Decisions. California : Crisp Publications, Inc.  

Morgan, G. 1986. Images of Organization. Thousand Oaks, CA:Sage Publicatiosn.  

Morgan, G. 1993. Imagination: the Art of Creative Management. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.  

Rowland, Gordon. Lighting the Fire of Design Conversation. Educational Technology/ January-February, 1996.  

Sahtouris, Elisabet. 1994. Earth Dance : Living Systems in Evolution. Available for down loading from her website: http://www.ratical.com/LifeWeb/   

Sahtouris, Elisabet [Interview with Scott London] Towards an Organic World View: http://www.west.net/~insight/elsa.html [or from her home page] http://www.ratical.com/LifeWeb/   

Williams, Linda Verlee. 1983. Teaching for the Two-sided Mind. New York: A Touchstone book, published by Simon & Shuster, Inc.  

Woodman, Marion http://www.now.com/issues/15/42/Ent/cover.html  
 
 
D) EXAMPLES OF METAPHORS:

The old scientific mechanistic paradigm dominant metaphor.  
   
Baars, Electronic Seminar: Consciousness And Self In The Brain:  A Global Workforce Perspective:  October 12 - October 22, 1997  http://www.phil.vt.edu/assc/esem.html 
"Metaphors and analogies have a long history in scientific thought. They include the Rutherford planetary analogy for atomic structure, the clockwork metaphor for the solar system, and Harvey's pump metaphor for the heart. 
 
 

Coombes and Holland 
"Mechanistic science is an example of the success of a particular  mythic mode of consciousness that has been carried forward with great energy, dedication, and commitment by many people."   
 
 
Elisabet Sahtouris, Interview with Scott London 
http://www.west.net/~insight/elsa.htm 
"It goes back to the Cartesian worldview, I think, in which Descartes proposed that God was a great engineer and his creations were mechanisms. That meant that all nature was an array of mechanisms created by God, the engineer, who then put a piece of his God - mind into his favorite robot -- man -- so that he, too, could create machinery. Now, whether you like it or not, that was a rather complete worldview that accounted for everything. When the scientists decided that they didn't need God in their worldview, they eliminated God from their Cartesian worldview but kept the idea of an array of mechanisms. Now how do you explain the origin of mechanisms without a creator? By definition, a machine cannot exist without a creator. If they are there and couldn't have been assembled on purpose by an intentional creator, the only alternative is to say they came together by accident. So you got these bizarre theories that literally say that if enough parts  of a Boeing 747 blow around in a whirlwind in a junkyard eventually one will  assemble itself. This is going to appear to us as perhaps the most bizarre and perhaps harebrained concepts of how things work that has ever been proposed in the history of the world. And I think it will be seen that way in the very near future, because it is fundamentally an illogical point of view. The problem was that they thought you had to choose between God, the purposeful inventor, and accident. We had no theory of self - creation as a perfectly natural, biological, universal event. Now we do, so we don'thave to invoke either hypothesis."  
 

Capra, 1993. Ch. 8 Tao of Physics 
"..... the universe as a mechanical system, the human body as a machine,  life within society a competitive struggle for existence, and  believed in unlimited material progress to be achieved through econimic and technological growth."
 

Alvin toffler, The Third Wave. 
"Businessmen, intellectuals, and revolutionaries of the Industrial period were mesmerized by machinery-fascinated by steam engines, clocks, looms, pumps, pistons and they constructed endless analogies based on simple mechanistic technologies of their time. No accident Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were scientists and inventors as well as political revolutionaries. They grew up in the wake of Newton's great discoveries - i.e. he had concluded that the entire universe was a giant clockwork operating with exact mechanical regularity. La Mettrie the Fr. physician and philosopher, in 1748 declared man himself to be a machine. Adam Smith later extended the analogy of the machine to economics, arguing that the economy is a system and that systems "in many respects resemble machines."
 

Toffler, the Third Wave, 1982 
Martin van Buren invented the "political machine" ...Lord Cromer conceived of an imperial govt. that would "ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine." Nor was the mechanistic mentality merely a product of capitalism, for Lenin, described that state as "nothing more than a machine used by the capitalists to suppress the workers." Trotsky spoke of "all the wheels and screws of the bourgeois mechanism and went on to describe the function of a revolutionary party in similarly mechanical phrases. Drenched in such  mechanistic thinking, imbued with an almost blind faith in the power and  efficiency of machines, the revolutionary founders of Second Wave societies, whether capitalist or socialist, not surprisingly invented political institutions that shared many characteristics with machines.
 

Hutchins, Systemic Thinking, 1995 
"Reductionism produced a "machine view" of the world, a view captured in the work of Sir Isaac Newton. Metaphorically the world was likened to a sealed clock, a closed system, perpetually running on fundamental laws like "to everything action  there is an equal and opposite reaction." In the 19th century this perspective was modified to accommodate theories of thermodynamics; the "clock didn't run indefinitely, it ran down toward as state of entropy, ultimately collapsing into a state of total disorder." 
 

Wheatley,  Leadership and the new Science, 1995 
"...the great clock ticked, we grew smart, and designed the age of machines...Prodded on to new discoveries, as the earth circled the sun like clockwork we grew assured of the role of determinism and prediction. We absorbed expectations of regularity into our very beings. And we organized work and knowledge to fit this universe."

Zohar in Wheatley, 1995 
"Classical physics transmuted the living cosmos of Greek and medieval times, a cosmos filled with purpose and intelligence and driven by the love of God for the benefit of humans -- into a dead, clockwork machine. .. Things moved because they were fixed and determined; cold science pervaded the once teeming heavens. Human beings and their struggles, the whole of consciousness, and life itself were irrelevant to the workings of the  vast universal machine." 
  
  

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Metaphors for Old Economic Paradigm Affluence and Overconsumption   

 Affluence  
On September 15th, 1997 an MPBN television program aired. Producer Mark was interviewed  by  Mark Jowatt of the newly formed Canadian based "Quality of Life Network". In that interview posted on the QLN list serve for virtual members  Mark explained his metaphor thus "It is a light hearted but ultimately serious look at a real social problem.  We take over-consumption and look at it as a virus/disease that is spreading through western industrial culture, particularly the U.S.  We look at how the symptoms affect us as people in many ways: the impacts on our health; on our families; family breakdown; a reduction in the  amount of time that people spend in the community; the extra work that we go through; and the problems of debt that are piling up for people.  We look at these humorously  and give out medical descriptions, so it is a rash of  bankruptcies, swollen expectations, shopping  fever,  fractured families, resource exhaustion.  We look at the impact on the environment and internationally in terms of a growing gap between rich and poor.  We say that things have really got out of balance and we need to redefine what the good life is all about and stop defining it so exclusively in terms of the piling up of stuff.  We look at a bit of the history of how we got that way. In the final part of the program the style changes a bit to a more serious tone and  we look at what can be done about all of this." 

The Cancer Stage Of Capitalism: 
Our social immune system is being overwhelmed by growing out-of-control money market cancer  By John McMurtry  [John McMurtry, professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph, uses the metaphor of modern capitalism as a cancer to describe the recent uncontrolled spread of global capitalism. Its invasive growth, he argues, threatens to break down our society's immune system and--if not soon restrained--could reverse all the progress that has been made toward social equity and stability. This essay is a condensed version of an article Prof. McMurtry wrote for the American journal "Social Justice" found at: 
http://www.islandnet.com/plethora/cancer.html 

The Body Metaphor for Present Economic and Political System-Elisabet Sahtouris  
"I devised a little model for children to show why the economics we do in the world today are not appropriate for living systems. I often refer people back to our own bodies which are a perfectly good example of a living system. All living systems obey the same principles. They have some fundamental things in common in their organization and function. 

Now if you were going to do world politics in your body, it would look something like this: You have raw material blood cells coming up in the marrow of bones throughout the body, and they are swept up to these northern industrial organs -- the heart-lung system -- where the blood is purified and oxygen is added and you now have a useful product. So the heart distribution center announces that the body price for blood today is so much, who wants? And the blood is shipped off to those organs that can afford it, and you chuck the rest out as surplus. You have to ask, is this a viable economics for a living system? You can see that it would kill the body to do economics in that way because some of the parts of the body that couldn't afford the blood (which now might be bottled until the price goes up) would now be starving and dying off. This is exactly what you see, of course, in the human world. We exploit some parts of humanity to the benefit of other parts. That cannot work in a living system. If your body decided to value the heart over the liver, or tried to turn the heart into a liver or something like that (which is the kind of crazy things we do as humans) it just couldn't function. It requires diversity. It requires that every cell look out for its own interest as well as for the communal interests of its tissue, its organ, and the whole body. No  one in nature asks anyone to make a decision between personal interest or communal interest. You don't decide whether to be on the left or the right, whether to be a conservative or a radical. You have to have both in nature. It is the source of all creativity -- this tension between the individual and the collective, the part and the whole. It is the fact that their interests are somewhat at odds that fires the creativity toward solutions. And then again there is always another imbalance in the system that has to be resolved. This is the great driving force of all creativity. We are never going to be able to reach perfection, and we are never going to be in total chaos. We are always going to operate between those two. We have to recognize the value of both sides. Capitalism is inherently no more viable than the communism that was practiced in the Soviet Union and some other places. One asked the individual to sacrifice himself to the whole, and the other asks the individual to sacrifice the whole to himself, which isn't viable either. So we are going to find a lot of chaos in this country as we begin to regroup, begin to understand living systems better, and begin to obey the principles of living systems as we develop an alternative society for the future." 

   

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Metaphors for the shifting world view or paradigm shift   

 River of Life  

    Rapids of change 
    "The Rapids of Change are a metaphor for our times. Those who have done river-rafting are aware of the exhilaration which comes from "going with" the flow of the river. We need to develop the same skills as we are swept with the current of change. We can then begin to recognize that we can also affect the dynamics of which we are a part." Robert Theobald 
    http://www.transform.org/transform/dlc/rapids/rapids.html 
      
      
    Life as River 
    "Life is a river and we each make decisions everyday about how to navigate it. The way the river flows is changing. The river of the past was generally calm, somewhat predictable, and moderately manageable. The river of the future is more turbulent, unusually unpredictable, and much less manageable. Our river is changing and our navigation should be changing. Life on the new river means we must learn, not only how to expect change and respond to it, but also how to imagine it and create it. In his book "Positive Uncertainty, for making decisions in changing times" describes the condition of today's river of life. The successful decision maker navigating the river needs to be understanding, accepting, even positive about that uncertainty. Today’s world like today’s river, is constantly changing. Today's decision maker should be as capable of change as the environment.  A smooth river flowing through a flat terrain in calm weather is a linear system. Our linear scientific methods make is possible to explain, predict, and control the smooth river. By contrast, a turbulent mountain stream, where water splashes over rocks and twists around eddies, is a nonlinear system.Because the linear scientific methods of the past cannot predict  the turbulent, stream's chaotic behaviors, a new science is born. The old science is not obsolete  just insufficient. Nonlinear science (quantum physics) was invented to find order in chaos. We know how to make rational, linear decisions on the predictable, calm river, but do we know how to manage the extraordinary complex, random parts of the turbulent river? We need some non-rational, nonlinear strategies. We need decision tactics for both steadiness and randomness; we need decision making skills and attitudes to manage both order and chaos, stability and inconsistency we need flexibility and balance. H.B.Gellatt, 1995 
     
     

The Third Wave 
    "When I speak of a wave of historic change sweeping across a society, I am not speaking of a single specific change- in technology e.g.  I am speaking of a whole chain of associated changes that reinforce one another and move the system in a definable direction. This began to happen with the First Wave - the spread of agriculture- a new way of life spread with  new social, political and religious institutions, its own principles for coping with the environment around it. When the industrial revolution launched the Second Wave of change it too began spreading a new way of life and new institutions, values and principles which came into intense conflict with the existing first wave institutions of  those whose economic and other interests arose from the agricultural way of life found themselves fighting off the upstart groups who were creating the industrial revolution .i.e. the aristocracy, the Church." Alvin Toffler
   
Metamorphosis: Butterfly   
  
    I like to use the metaphor of the butterfly. In metamorphosis, within the body of the caterpillar little things that biologists call imaginal discs or imaginal cells begin to crop up in the body of the caterpillar. They aren't recognized by the immune system so the caterpillar's immune system wipes them out as they pop up. It isn't until they begin to link forces and join up with each other that they get stronger and are able to resist the onslaught of the immune system, until the immune system itself breaks down and the imaginal cells form the body of the butterfly. I think that is a beautiful metaphor for what is happening in our times. The old body is going into meltdown while the new one develops. It isn't that you end one thing and then start another. So everybody engaged in recycling, in alternative projects, in communal living, in developing healthier systems for themselves and each other is engaged in  building the new world while the old one collapses. Its collapse is inevitable. There is no way around that. 
     
  
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Metaphors for the Emerging Systemic Paradigm  

Gaia:   
GAIA as a metaphor is "the web of Life", as believed by many aboriginal societies and now an emergent cross-disciplinary new  inter-disciplinary emergent paradigm. This new paradigm, the skeleton of which is conceptualized in General Systems Theory and Evolutionary Systems Theory, embraces Living Systems Theory, Self- Organization Theory, Cybernetics, Chaos Theory and Complexity Theory, dynamical systems theory and related fields such as  ecology, holism and ecopsychology. 
 

Gaia as metaphor explained by Elisabet Sahtouris Interview with Stephen London Excerpts from the text found at:      
http://www.west.net/~insight/elsa.htm 

    London: Your book revolves around the Gaia theory which was developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. How would you characterize the Gaia theory? 
     
    Elisabet Sahtouris: Jim Lovelock is an atmospheric scientist from England. He proposed that the earth was a living, self-organizing entity, and called it Gaia after the Greek name of the original goddess of creation who became the earth itself. I differ a little bit from Lovelock and Margulis in how I talk about Gaia because I never call it either a hypothesis (which is what they first called it) or a theory. To me it is a conceptualization of the earth as alive to replace our conceptualization of the earth as an array of mechanisms. It's part of the transition in general from a mechanical worldview to an organic worldview, to see the world as alive. For me it's alive by definition. I use the definition of life which was proposed by two biologists from South America, Maturana and Varela, which goes by the name of autopoiesis. Autopoiesis is a Greek word, of course, meaning literally "self-creation." The definition goes: a living entity is any entity that constantly creates itself. This really distinguishes it from a mechanism, because a machine is not constantly creating itself. In fact, if it changes itself at all it's probably broken ......while a living thing is always changing, or it's dead. So, it's a conceptualization, not a hypothesis or a theory. Within that conceptualization, that scientific framework, you would propose hypotheses or make theories about how it functions. 
     
    London: When Lovelock first proposed this, he said he was using poetic and metaphorical language. So, in addition to presenting this as a scientific hypothesis, he was also using it as a metaphor. Today the Gaia theory or hypothesis is bandied around a lot as a nice "metaphor," but is it taken seriously by the scientific community? 

    Sahtouris: One of the things that happened was that people who get identified as "new age" (and that means a lot of things) got very excited about the Gaia hypothesis of Jim Lovelock, because intuitively everyone knows that nature is alive, that the earth is alive. In fact, our western industrial culture is the only one in history that has not known that the earth is alive. 


The Whispering Pond: 
A Concluding Thought from "The Whispering Pond"  by Ervin Laszlo 
"The theories and concepts of science are not merely the source of technological systems and gadgetry, they are also a source of meaning.  When we come right down to it, how we relate to each other and to nature depends on our concepts of nature, of life, and of the thinking and feeling human being -- on concepts that are involuntarily yet significantly influenced by science. 
  
If we believe that nature is a lifeless mechanism, a collection of  passive rocks, we will come to believe that we are entitled to do with it as we please, so long as we do not go against our interests. Our choice of technologies will reflect these beliefs, we shall opt for powerful machines to extract, transform, use, and discard the energies and materials found in our environment, If we look on animals and other people as but more complex machines, we shall manipulate them, too, we will cut out the dysfunctional parts and organs, splice up their genes, or rewire the circuitry of their brain. We shall also manipulate people's social and political behavior, their labor, even their lifestyles,consumption patterns, and leisure time activities 
  
But what if nature -- the universe itself -- is not a passive rock or lifeless machine? What if people are not complex machines, and not separate from each other and from their environment but profoundly, though subtly,  linked ? 
 
And what if the entire cosmos throbs with the creative energy of self-organization, constantly evolving, with periodic bursts of explosive innovation? If this is the concept we get from science, and if we assimilate it with our intellect and  embrace it with our heart would we still relate to each other and to our environments in quite the same way? 
 
In this book (The Whispering Pond) we have argued that it is something like this organic image that science is beginning to project.  We have seen that the current wave of change sweeping through the natural sciences leaves behind the last remnants of the mechanical view of life, mind, and universe. Space and time are united as the dynamic background of the observable universe; matter is vanishing as a fundamental feature of reality, retreating before energy, and continuous fields are replacing the discrete particles as the basic elements of an energy-bathed cosmos. And the final destiny of this world need no longer be a lapse into the grayness of a lukewarm, empty and eternally unchanging nothingness, but could well be a cyclic renewal in a self-creating, self-energizing, and self-organizing mega-universe. 
   
The current shift in science's concept of the world from a lifeless rock to a interconnected and  quasi-living universe has intense meaning and significance for our times. The concept of a subtly interconnected world, of a whispering pond in and through which we are intimately linked to each other and to the universe. assimilated by our intellect and embraced by our heart, is part of humanity's response to the challenges that we now face in common. Our separation from each other and from nature is at the root of many of our problems, overcoming them calls for a recovery of our neglected, but never entirely forgotten, bonds and connections. 
  
Unexpectedly but perhaps not entirely accidentally, the vision emerging in the workshops of the avant-garde sciences could inspire ways of thinking and acting that would go a long way toward facilitating current efforts to transform the specter off a global crisis into the splendor of a humane and sustainable civilization. 
 
With poets insight. T.S.Eliot asked, "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man you cannot say, or guess,  for you know only a heap of broken images...." The new sciences help us surmount this predicament. They give us the vision of a whispering pond. of a universe where all things are linked in a fundamental way. The insights that  emerge is both meaningful and timely. It confirms psychologist-philosopher James' image: "we are like islands in the sea - separate on the surface, but connected in the deep." Ervin Laszlo (1996) The Whispering Pond: A personal Guide to the Emerging Vision of Science. Massachusetts, Dorset, Queensland: ELEMENT. 
  
     
Net, Network, Web Metaphor: 
Net- Indira's Net - from Hindu Mythology: 
A good explanation of the Hindu/Buddhist myth of Indra's net is found in, of all places, The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra: "...particles are dynamically composed of one another in a self-consistent way, and in that sense can be said to 'contain' one another. In Mahayana Buddhism, a very similar notion is applied to the whole universe. This cosmic network of interpenetrating things is illustrated in the Avatamsaka Sutra by the metaphor of Indra's net, a vast network of precious gems hanging over the palace of the god  Indra. In the words of Sir Charles Eliot: 
  
          In the Heaven of Indra, there is said to be a network of pearls, 
          so arranged that if you look at one you see all the others 
          reflected in it. In the same way each object in the world is not  
          merely itself but involves every other object and in fact IS 
          everything else. "In every particle of dust, there are present 
          Buddhas without number." 
 
The similarity of this image to the hadron bootstrap is indeed  striking. The metaphor of Indra's net may justly be called the first  bootstrap model, created by the Eastern sages some 2,500 years before the beginning of particle physics." Fritjof Capra --Chapter 8 of The Turning Point - Fritjof Capra (1982) http://magna.com.au/~prfbrown/capra_0.html 
  
  

Canada in a World of Rapid Change:  Future Choices and Consequences 
Four different metaphors/ images and scenarios: 
The scenarios are described, in short story form, using ship metaphors: The first scenario, named Starship, envisions a world characterized by an economic boom and the development of a new consensus. The second scenario, named Titanic, is the other extreme, featuring low or no economic growth, coupled with growing social fragmentation. The third scenario, christened Bounty, combines a booming economy with continued social fragmentation and polarization. The fourth scenario, named Windjammer, envisions a new social consensus emerging around a low or no growth economy (at least as conventionally measured). The roundtable decided to use the names of ships (and associated images that the particular names evoke) to make it easier (visually and conceptually) to distinguish between the different scenarios. In other words metaphors. http://canada.gc.ca/fovis_e.html#more  
 
   
Leadership for the Quantum Age 
"Those who have used music metaphors in describing leadership, particularly jazz metaphors, are on  a quantum track. Improvisation is the saving skill. As leaders, we play a crucial role in selecting the melody, setting the tempo, establishing the key, and inviting the players. But that is all we can do. The music comes from something we cannot direct, from a unified whole created among the players--a relational holism that transcends separateness. In the end, when it works, we sit back , amazed and grateful."   Margaret Wheatley 
 
 

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