The following is an account of a male-male wild olive baboon greeting.

“A typical greeting begins with one male walking upright rapidly toward another with a straight legged, rolling stride. The approaching male looks directly at his intended partner while making friendly gestures, such as smacking his lips, flattening his ears back, and narrowing his eyes. Often the second male maintains contact and smacks his lips in return. In that case, the animals get up close and personal. They often begin with a quick hug and or nuzzle. One then presents his hind quarters; the other grasps them, mounts the reversed partner, and touches his scrotum or gently pulls his penis. Sometimes participants exchange active and passive roles  during a single greeting. After a completed greeting, which usually lasts no more than a few seconds, both males walk away using the stiff legged gait characteristic of the approach.”

I noticed a beautiful young man at the gym and later in the day another handsome young man walking on the street. Classic beauty. At first I thought it was the same person. I was wrong.  Athletic men, graceful and strong, the young Gods are all over Manhattan on this summer day. The Gay Pride March is over. I didn’t go. Such events make me feel sad.

In the New York Times I saw a photo of two GI’s in army fatigues, in fantastic shape, two hundred pounds of muscle, embracing in a crowded airport after what appeared to be a long absence. One man lifts his lover in the air; the other man has his legs wrapped tightly around his partner’s waist. They are kissing. One thing is for sure. No one is going to call them sissies. A married couple? Maybe. It’s legal now to get married in New York. As I view this celebratory photo, an aesthetic pleasure arises in me like music from a very high altitude. Joy and envy mixed.

I find a mythic resonance, as Gilgamesh is reunited with his beloved Enkidu, a dream come true, an ancient promise fulfilled. My musing upon these handsome young men in the photograph is mixed. I will miss out on that experience. As I am an older man, I have the need to keep my envy in check.  I can’t compete with them, nor do I want to.  I breathe in my envy and breathe out their beauty. They will have the freedom to be who they really are, without the distortions I have had to live with during all the decades of don’t ask don’t tell. I fought for them before they were born but I won’t envy them. They will have battles that I won’t have. Hello young lovers wherever you are, I hope that you’re troubles are few!

Simone Weill said lust is when we try to eat what we should only look at. I think she got it right. I walked over to Washington Square with a pile of books I’d picked up from the library and browsed them as I was enchanted by the colors of the late afternoon. And many loners like me, sit with a book on an empty bench, in the gentle shade, enjoying the natural drift, while the musicians play, the dogs poop, the Frisbees fly, the kids squeal with delight. I breathe in the beauty and breathe out the beauty. I can never understand this moment for it isn’t an intellectual achievement. The Tao that can be said is not the real Tao. I know all that. And yet…

The beauty is beyond my capacity to catch, to hold all the tender, tiny details, the moving features of the landscape. How gorgeous they are today, my fellow creatures, so gorgeous that it hurts… and I have let go.  I will never get it right. I know that and yet …this non dual shit… whatever it is… I can’t say what this feeling is…I can only say what it is like…This is feeling is  like a male-male wild olive baboon greeting!!! I have found my own metaphor. I am happy.

Suddenly, I feel the presence of Walt Whitman for he was a lover of Manhattan and a great metaphor maker. He must have had a similar response to the Gods and Goddesses of his day as he worshiped too at the edge of infinity, seeing through the form into that which is beyond form and time and trying to turn it into language. I tune into his presence for he loved me as much as I love him, though I was unborn when he wrote his poems. I was his future and he knew that. This love is palpable, embodied, passed on from generation to generation. I am so happy it starts to hurt. Whitman’s way of loving is alive in me as I sit lazily at Washington Square, lifted up into a reverie without words.

History, poetry and life itself are happening all at once on this park bench as I puzzle over my book on Goethe Science. I enjoy this public solitude, even though I want to abandon it, to strike up a conversation with a stranger, but I have another chapter to read from the Goethe book and soon I will be finished.

I drift off again. I wonder if there are connections to be made between this lazy, lovely afternoon and the debates that Goethe and Schiller engaged in. What is the relationship between Archetype and Reality?Goethe thought the science he envisioned was in the future. Are we there yet? Or will we kick that bucket down the road?  What is it that we are after?

Perhaps I will never know, perhaps Goethe was wrong about a science of the perceptual.  And when my notes are gathered, the reflections shared, the conclusions reached, what happens next? Will some adventurer a hundred years from now come across the Magellan site and will she wonder what the hell we were thinking about so long ago in the ancient days? Will she wonder what a male-male wild olive baboon greeting could have meant to a middle aged gay man back in Manhattan before the waters rose and swallowed up the Big City? We can only imagine.

” And what I assume you shall assume, for what belongs to me as good belongs to you.”                                                                            Walt Whitman

Fifteen years ago in a park in lower Manhattan, I was lying on my stomach in the grass, my shirt off, reading a book called, Belonging to the Universe. The book discussed the life of St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of the ecology movement. He was famous for his astonishing ability to communicate with animals, even making friends with a she wolf. Captivated by his story, I had a yearning to be able to communicate with the animals as he had done.

Enjoying the lazy afternoon, hearing the shouts of the children splashing in the pool, observing the play of the light on the leaves of the trees, I asked myself ‘what would it be like to be able to talk to the animals?’

Lo and behold, as soon as I asked the question, a bird landed a few feet from me. It was a small black bird with gold flecks on its wings, a very common bird, I’d seen many times before but I knew on this occasion I was in the presence of something uncanny. As the bird looked at me I felt a thrill of recognition. The bird seemed as curious about me as I was about him. The bird perched on my butt, then slowly hopped up my bare back. I felt its delicate little claws touch each vertebra. A wave of energy went up and down my spine. The little fellow perched on my shoulder. I held my breath. He was an inch away from my face. We were eye to eye. Then the most amazing thing happened. He perched on my head and began to sing. He had a glorious, huge sound for such a tiny creature. He was pure ecstasy. Then he pooped on my head and flew away!

Overjoyed!  I had the answer to my question given in a direct way. Then  it occurred to  me that I had no idea how this could happen? How could a bird read my mind? In what language? Through what code?And who or what was coordinating this exchange of energy and information? I felt a great responsibility to resolve the paradox that the experience presented to my conventional view of things. How was I to do this?

Since that summer day in Tompkins Square, I have studied many reports such as mine and have concluded  that there has been a deep bias against such a study among certain kinds of scientific thinkers.This I am glad to say is starting to change. Many researches believe anomalies, serendipitous events and synchronicities share a deep structure and are worth studying.

How can we study these kinds of accounts scientifically? Until I read about Goethe’s Science I was in doubt. Now I believe that a science of perception such as Goethe envisioned in a far away future has perhaps arrived. I expect that  future science which he dreamed of is within our reach.  Through the qualitative research I have been exploring in this course I am more confident  a contemplative science is possible.

We are learning  how to tune into the ineffable. This is a state of radical unknowing. Being comfortable with this state is essential to being a good meditator or an effective modeler. We need to be able to generate a diffuse and focused awareness at the same time. I have found that using clean language questions in a safe atmosphere promotes this kind of meta-awareness.  We are getting better at this.

Communication is another important theme.  Language relies on subject/ object. Conventional language forces us to pay attention to the subject/object dichotomy. The Clean Language Model which I have been sharing with some of my colleagues  on this course is a way to by pass these habits which inhibit certain kinds of knowing. Going beyond the conceptual  into the metaphorical  is an acquired  skill. I sense that many of us are already operating out of this kind of awareness but in an unconscious way.

Metaphor is the royal road to the Integration of the Ineffable. The integration of form and formless has been captured by great mystics through out the ages. They resort to metaphor.

‘My eye is a window. The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.’ Meister Eckhardt

This is not just a capacity of poets and mystics. Science is full of metaphorical constructs.  The Big Bang. The particle and the wave. I believe that meditation. lucid dreaming combined with interviewing methods such as I am developing could be an effective program to expand our understanding of  the interplay of language and body, art and science, archetype and anomaly. This is the fourth dimension.

I hope these musings will stir other people to share and investigate their alternate ways of knowing/being and find a program that is right for you. I believe it is crucial that we bring our private experiences of alternate ways of knowing/being into the public domain.This course is providing us with a wonderful opportunity to create such a forum,to develop such skills. We can then create communities that will rejuvenate our troubled relationships to each other, to other species, to our environment and to God.

This morning after drawing the conductor of the opera I open up and write and the words and the drawing start opening up sensitivities that are well hidden in the habits of making coffee and scrambling eggs and doing the routine of the day and yet is there a way to perform the routines with attention that is aware of the deep down things?

As Emily in Our Town is aware of the deep down things of the ordinariness of the common objects suddenly known as the miracles that they actually are as she leaves this plane of existence…I have done the drawing and I think about it and have feelings about the drawing and I remember something…

I am taking care of Marcus. He only has a few weeks to live. We are in his bed and while he sleeps, I watch his breathing, relieved that he has stopped coughing. While he sleeps beside me I am grateful for I love Marcus and he is alive and I know that soon he won’t be, It is the afternoon. Outside the window I gaze at the Hudson River and the clear blue sky and below a maze of roof tops and barbed wire fences and jagged streets. I turn my attention to what’s on TV.

On TV I see the great cellist Yo Yo Ma playing a Rachmaninoff piece I am unfamiliar with. Yo Yo plays with his eyes closed, a face enraptured. I am moved because he is so moved. I listen because he listens to something that is beyond me, that I don’t understand but he understands and so I trust him to reveal the music’s meaning through his body and his hugging that big fat cello between his legs, loving that deep dark sound it makes as he plucks and scrapes that cat gut against those thick strings.

Then I suddenly get a flash of Leonard Bernstein. I feel his presence strongly. He is my favorite conductor. As a young person I listened to all his recordings and was enchanted by his teaching style He brought Bach and Beethoven into my life, that lonely gay boy living in Texas who loved classical music and culture and wanted to live a big life in a big city somewhere, somehow. I thought fondly of the maestro and asked myself how Lennie is doing these days? I wonder what he is up to. I listen for awhile longer, get sleepy and turn over to Marcus and snuggle close to him. My baby.

The next day with total comprehension I read that Leonard Bernstein had died of a massive heart attack while listening to Yo Yo Ma perform Rachmaninoff.  Total comprehension? What an audacious idea. Yet it is true. In that moment my left brain caught up with my right brain and realized Lennie had visited me and perhaps millions of others during Yo Yo’s recital. As he left this plane of existence to dwell among the love warriors beyond the stars he gave all of his students a last farewell kiss. Lennie’s kiss was to all the music lovers that he had served during his wild and precious life. That comprehension sustained me during what was going to happen as I descended into what was to become a frightful initiation into the deep down real things of this very real world.

And today as I send this message out into the world I love as I love God I wonder if this qualifies for Goethe Science? One thing I know from this process I have found a benevolent patriarch in Lennie who was my teacher then and is my teacher now. I am so glad we have reconnected.

When I am learning at my best I am like the conductor of the opera.

And is there anything else about that conductor?

The conductor is grounded-he’s in the pit, the bowels of the orchestra-his body is sort of half human and half non human attuned to the earth below the rocks and trees he feels downwards into the cracks and crevices and dirt and old bones and black holes, sub atomic particles flashing off and on in and out…phase space…transitions…wordless

And is there anything else about wordless?

He rides the waves of music embracing caressing merging with the sounds and colors of the orchestra he is in love with and  feeling the breathing of the singers and we breathe together forever in love and hold each other in a configuration of time and multiple perspectives I perceive through their bodies and we go sky high up into the dark past the stars..

And is there anything else about  perceive through their bodies?

We blend into a vibration that is constant the flows and jagged jumping pulsating dynamics of sound patterns emerge out of and return to the dark constant vibration as we singer and audience yearn for the climax of the music and the fading away afterwards into the nothingness again and  again-and dying together again and again…

And then what happens next?

We are not the body We are not the mind  we  untie the knot in the night sky…we are the night…

I saw a dance performance featuring my friend Rob, choreographed by Heidi Latsky at the New City in New York. Rob, a trained dancer, has Parkinson’s disease. Many of the members of the Latsky Company have various ‘disabilities’ while some of the performers are ‘normal’. The choreography invites us to see in a new way, beyond such categories. The label ‘disabled’ makes little sense in the context of this choreography which seems to find differences in the dancers compelling rather than a disadvantage.

Last season when I saw first saw this company, I discovered with a shock,  that a virtuoso dancer that I assumed was ‘normal’ walked with a cane, his hand on another persons shoulder to guide him to the footlights for the curtain call. He was blind. How could a blind person dance like that? How could he orient in space? Keep time to the music?

With this memory in mind, the recent performance I saw was no less remarkable. I was struck by the powerful dancing of a black man who was ‘disabled’ but managed to perform a stunning solo to a loud punk version of ‘Over the Rainbow’. He conjured up a sense of suffering and attempted transcendence with his fast, fiery, staccato movement as if  he wanted to jump out of his skin.Just as this mood became overwhelming the music halted suddenly and he disappeared into the dark.

Rob walked slowly from stage right, looking frail and ethereal. He entered into the center spot light with Judy Garland’s classic version of ‘Over the Rainbow’. He opened up a folding chair, sat upon it with his back to the audience, leaned forward with his arms outstretched to the dark beyond the spotlight, moving like a Tai Chi master, the element of air in strong contrast to the previous dancer’s fire, an aged eagle spreading his wings. I enjoyed the contrast very much. The piece was titled. Somewhere.

In the lobby afterwards, I greeted Rob and was introduced to others in his dance company. I observed the black dancer in casual street clothes, a gentle, handsome face, his fierceness gone; he walked across the lobby to greet his friends with an asymmetrical stride unnoticeable on stage. On stage he was able to transform that imbalance, creating an image of the center of a storm, a powerful Shiva figure. I wondered when he stepped into the role on stage, entering into the energies of the archetype, where did the disability go? Perhaps he was freed from the limitations of other people’s perceptions of him and could re-invent himself in a way that the ‘normal’ world forbids. I walked out into the streets with my perceptions changed, feeling  my own problems vanish in the crisp night air.

Here is an experiment that I believe might be fun and profound. I invite any member of our Goethe group to participate.

1. And when you are learning at your best, you’re like what?

2. Write down the answer.

3. Draw a picture of your answer to the question.

4. As you contemplate your drawing, what are you most attracted to? What are you most drawn to?

5. Jot down any responses that are meaningful to you. Post the drawing and any notes you want to share.

After you have posted a drawing  with comments I would like to follow up with a few clean language questions. I would prefer to record the interview and perhaps ask some follow up questions. This is a kind of group modeling experiment that will  I hope be a useful shared event. After the interviews are collected those who participate  can then describe the effects of this event. On today’s con call I will ask for any feedback about this plan. Thank you!

My Goethe project is to study our Goethe project. My focus is on modeling our language patterns. Here are a few notes about my project and the adjacent possibilites.

What is modeling? How to model groups? How to create knowledge communities? That’s what I want to find out. By focusing on our Goethe group I will search for significant patterns, processes and structures  and with the help of the group, find a way to create a transformative research project.

Definitions and assumptions. A model is a kind of blueprint from which theories are made. A model is a description of what is actually happening in a system. Modeling is pragmatic, goal oriented, good for finding out how to acquire a skill, make something work better. We can model others or ourselves. There are all kinds of models and meta-models for different purposes. This is a rapidly evolving field and I hope our work together can further that progress.All modeling is really self modeling. I am learning about your patterns through employing my own patterns.My bias is towards bottoms-up modeling.I expect that I will make lots of mistakes so I humbly submit to that as a necessary condition for meta-learning.

What is a pattern? A pattern is a configuration that repeats itself, requires space, time,  form and is perceived by a perceiver. You can’t transform unless you have a form. By locating perceptions in perceptual space and proper naming, attributes and qualities emerge and a form is established. After we have embodied our perceptions and the form is emerging, then we can discover the relationships between formations, investigate intentionality, explore the tacit dimension. That’s what will be the focus of my questions.

I believe this way of working qualifies as Goethian Science. I imagine Goethe out in a field with his plants, getting a feel for patterns of  plants as they change across the life span of the plant from youth to maturity to senescence. He searched for the archetype, the meta-pattern, what he called the ‘parent’ plant. He used his imagination to re-construct the relationship of the actual plant with the hidden archetype that unfolded through time.  I believe there are connections to his way of doing science and what I am proposing to do with modeling the language patterns of our group.I am looking for what is between patterns, slowing down, paying careful attention to the details and then zooming back and taking in the big picture. He was a master at this dynamic interplay. Unlike Goethe the phenomena that I am observing can observe me as well. Also my bias is to focus more on the idiosyncratic and unique in a person’s symbolic landscape, rather than find a pregiven archetype.

I doubt Goethe was into inductive or deductive reasoning as he was into the abductive; the magical ‘as if ‘ kind of reasoning that connects poetry and visionary science. Although he expressed a Platonic streak, he seems to be a bottoms up kind of investigator as well.  As he studied patterns of leaves in plants at various stages of growth, seeing each pattern as connected to the life of the individual plant he could intuit the history of the entire species of that plant.  In the same way that he worked with plants, we, the Goethe group, in our shared discourse events, can ‘listen’ to each discourse event we share and as we are aware of the history of this particular group can also be aware of the histories of the biological and cultural groupings that we are each connected to through  our unique language patterns. There are many layers operating in each sentence. That is my job, to sort this out and let each participant find her own voice, her own metaphor.

I am so pleased to be a member of this accomplished group of creative imaginaries and look forward to our collaborations. Thanks to everyone for this great opportunity.