Praise the Holy Grail of Indeterminacy
And the first thing we have to understand is that the problems that we face in our lives are becoming ever more complex. The world is becoming more complex. And that complexity is also filled with indeterminacy, so that it’s a dancing landscape of complexity that doesn’t remain the same—you can’t diagram it and say “OK, now I can study what to do” because the situation’s going to morph in a new way, by the time you’ve figured out how it looked five minutes ago, you already now have to figure out its new form that is emerging out of what had been there, and has already disappeared and been replaced. These kinds of situations require a quick distillation of the complexity into simplicity.
Complexity Distillation. So, we have to reverse EVOL into LOVE. Now I spelled evil [evol] in a neologistic way, not as it’s usually spelled—not just because it fits the corny acronym that I’m trying to impose on you, but because I want to create a concept that combines evol and evolution. Because we’re in a world that’s filled with a lot of evil, but it’s evolving. And even against its own will, it’s evolving into goodness. But if you’re stuck on labelling it as evil, you will not be able to see the ability you might have to accelerate its evolution into another form, without resisting it, or hating it, or being repulsed by it, or running away from it—but being able to see it with its inherent ambiguity and indeterminacy, so that there is a way that you can influence its evolutionary development, into a form that will be harmonious with the intentions that you are serving.
So, the first element of this acronym is that you have to deal with the emotional volatility of people, and the inconsistency of their emotional states, and perhaps their lack of emotional intelligence, or self-understanding, and an inability to cope with stresses that can bring about a shift of emotional state, such that a dissociated fragment of the ego comes to replace the fragment that was there a moment before, and suddenly you’re actually dealing with another being, another persona, and you have to be aware if and when such a shift happens, and either get back the original one, or create more of a unitive connection between two possibly dissociated fragments that never have met each other. And many egos have such. If you have such, of course then that has to be dealt with first.
But this emotional volitivity quotient that you will be able to recognize in different people, will prevent them from keeping their promises. And so, if you’re in a social organization where you depend on people being responsible for commitments and promises that they made, and yet they’re unable to do it, that’s going to create a real monkey wrench in your operation, if you’re not able to both precognitively recognize the danger, and know how to prevent it from manifesting. So, there has to be an ability to have a barometric reading of the emotional instability that might lurk behind a very placid and composed mask, that could suddenly shift a situation into looking very different than you had assumed that you were participating in.
The next one is Value Indeterminacy, and this needs to be understood in several different ways. For one thing, something that you valued in the past, and took for granted had value for you, may no longer have value. It may be an artifact of an obsolete frame of reference that you want to jettison and not continue. And if you are stuck with a very rigid value system and don’t recognize that conditions may have turned one value from being a good, to being an evil, or being something unwanted, then you won’t be able to respond in real time to what is now required in order to keep a situation in balance and harmony, or progressing toward a desired goal.
So, we also have to recognize that every value contains its opposite. The good does contain evil, the evil does contain good, and the right does contain some wrongness, and the wrongness has something in it that is right about it. And the more that we’re able to see all sides of a particular event, or situation or thing, or idea, and not value it in a univocal way, but recognize that it has many possible values—negative and positive—in different situations and applications, so that we can remain very agile in the way that we relate to particular things, and orders of value, and belief systems, etc., and not be stuck in a rule-based and rigid reactivity to events that are evolving in unprecedented ways.
So that means that we must not have closure, not have judgmental closure, on a person or a situation, but always see its potential for whatever is happening, even if it looks extremely anti-social, or anti-harmony; that it may actually be bringing out a potentiality that was latent in a situation that only through allowing, let’s say, the dark side of someone’s personality, can their power to turn their, let’s say, anger, into a kind of determination and tenacity that will enable them to propel themselves through a difficulty. So we have to be very non-determinative ourselves in labelling the kinds of things that people are doing, and be able to recontextualize what their value might be, rather than to try to stop them from doing whatever they’re doing, but be able to ride the wave and be able to make use of—if you’ve got lemons make the lemonade—etc., etc., and not fall into a situation where you feel defeated, or you feel betrayed, or you feel in some way trapped in a deadlock of some kind.
The next factoring complexity is the Obscurity of the Meaning. Literally, what did they mean by what they said? What’s the meaning of this event? What was the meaning of the French Revolution? You know, what’s the meaning of anything that happens? And rather than trying to get out of the obscurity of an unknown situation, a “known unknown”, as well as perhaps an “unknown unknown”—to be able to deal with that with one’s own capacity for approaching ambiguity with a sense that whether the coin comes up heads or tails, you can win. You don’t have to put all your money onto one side of the coin. And you’re able to recognize that that kind of obscurity also functions to bring about possibilities that are hidden within confusion that actually may bring out lucidities of kinds that you wouldn’t have expected would be there.
So again, it’s being open to the potentiality of situations, and re-dreaming them with a complete win-win modality of recognition and assumption that will enable something to flower in ways that it, or they, might not have expected, to the benefit of all.
And finally, what creates complexity in most situations that we face, is: The Latency Period of Emergent Reactivity. So there are many situations and projects and people who have emergent properties that have not yet emerged, and may not emerge for some time—the chick isn’t going to come out of the egg for a certain amount of time—but we don’t want to give up on that egg prematurely and we want to also be able to recognize: is it gonna come out as a chicken, or is it a peacock, or is it a hawk, or is it… right, something else? Is it a dinosaur? But we have to know that latency also can shift the unfoldment of plans; “the best-laid plans of mice and men oft gang a-gley” because of a latent emergent reaction; somehow you have an agreement with someone and two days later they change their mind, and they are furious that they agreed, and they want to undo it, and you’ve already gone ahead and invested in the project and it’s too late to stop it.
Those kinds of latent, emergent reactions—whether they’re emotional or they’re factors of a situation that you hadn’t been able to foresee—we need to be able to recognize that not everything that is going on in a situation has boiled up to the surface yet. That doesn’t mean that the volcano isn’t going to erupt tomorrow, but the more that we can palpate its temperature and the various factors that could bring about a sudden shift, the more that we’re able to deal with it in a version of its being that is much more simple and present as a whole, rather than with parts underground but waiting to erupt.
So, to be sensitive to all these factors means that we have to move with a great lightness of being—perhaps an unbearable lightness of being to the ego—because we have to be OK with indeterminacy