First in a three part series.

Thirty years ago, when I was growing up in Edmonton, Alberta, turning eighteen meant you were an adult. It was passage. From a kind of frivolity of teen years to real responsibility of adult life. It was not just any birthday. It was added celebration. You could now vote in political elections. Go to a bar. Live on your own. Join the military. Follow university studies. Begin careers. Travel abroad. Sign legal documents. Adult stuff.

I won’t pretend to have been particularly thoughtful about this shift in my own life. I remember people talking about added freedom and added responsibility. But, then, as it is now for many living in the western world, it was a transition made largely without conscious initiation. For most, no group of elders to send us on vision quests or to help us receive spirit totems. It was mostly sideways, wobbly self-initiation. Like buying stuff. A car or a stereo.

Over thirty years, I’ve learned much more about being an adult. First and foremost, that becoming an adult is not a singular moment. It is of course, an ongoing process to revisit often regardless of age. And lately, my revisiting, my thinking, has been from my perspective as a father. I wonder to myself, what I can share with my kids that helps them as participants in more deliberate passage? What are a few simple markers that can help them as they nibble at the front edges adult life?

This past summer, my daughter and I took a dream trip together to Greece. She had turned 18 six weeks prior. Graduated from high school three weeks before that. She was signed up to begin university studies a month after we would return. She would be living on campus, in a dorm with a friend. My daughter and I shared four days in old Athens. Eight days on the Pelion Peninsula in and around the Kastri Beach. And two days on the airplane. We were both anticipating many things on this trip. Fun. Food. Friends -- we stayed at a friends family flat in Athens and near her home on the Pelion. New language. Culture. Visiting sites. History. Olive trees. Beach. The Aegean Sea. Singing songs from Mamma Mia -- some of the filming for the movie took place at the islands of Skiathos and Skopelos, near the Pelion.

Fun, right? 

For me, fun becomes super fun, and super important, when integrated with deliberate conversation and sharing. The real stuff in our lives. Just as much as I welcomed the joy of swimming in the Aegean, I relished prolonged time with my daughter. Just as much as I wanted to explore the Acropolis, I wanted to share and explore with my daughter learnings about passage that would endure and might guide her life or ours together. Like the Acropolis, the city on the hill, learnings that could be easily seen from many vantage points in future life. 

Below are the three practices I shared with my daughter. Practices. To do items. They aren’t formula. That are start-here points. I trust that in her, in me, and in others, the next steps that come from these practices will make themselves clear. 

1. Take Responsibility for Your Learning -- Stop Blaming

As a kid, I remember feeling that the world was run by adults. They were the smart ones. They were the ones that knew what was going on. It was for them to do. And, well, to provide for me. I was a reasonably responsible kid and young adult. I took pride in being a good helper and a tenacious worker. But still, the adults were supposed to take care of things in the end, right? Even when I screamed for my independence, underneath, I think I still wanted them to provide. To make it easy.

Adult passage involves taking more responsibility. For learning. For emotions. It’s less about passive participation. It is more about owning up to being a contributor. A contributor in relation to others. Less about blaming others for varied problems or deficiencies. More about seeing interconnectedness and one’s place within that.

I was once driving with a friend and his teenaged daughter. He was teaching her how to drive a car. I sat in the back seat. He in the passenger front seat. She driving, one of her first times behind the wheel. My friend was so calm, guiding her. In such a soothing voice, telling her in advance, what was coming, what lane she would need to be in, where to turn. His daughter drove. Hands on the wheel. Looking intently in front of her. Nervous. But, I believe quite thrilled to be driving. Feeling the power of it. At one point, the four-laned road curved. Rather than holding her lane to follow the curve, my friend’s daughter drove a straight line, crossing into another traffic lane. She didn’t think to check to see if anyone was behind her. If there would have been, she would have cut that person off, or possibly hit them. My friend jumped on this one. He told her, with tension and relief, that she had to look before she changed lanes. She had to know where she was and what was around her. It was simple. Something that his daughter will likely get very easily in the future. Something that all of us who learn to drive may have experienced. I remember her response  to her dad as a mixture of apology and defensiveness. “You should have told me. I didn’t know I was supposed to check.” It was a kind of externalizing of responsibility. A subtle way of blaming. Blaming another. Blaming her dad. She will learn. And hopefully be safe.

There is a participative process methodology that I use often when working with groups. It is called Open Space Technology. It helps participants to claim the kind of responsibility I’m talking about here. In short, it is a self-organizing process with just enough structure to help people form working groups and learning groups. It is a way to help a group of people create their own agenda. My friend and colleague Peggy Holman talks about these self-created agendas as “taking responsibility for what you love.” You get to choose what you are going to learn rather than it being assigned to you. If it interests you, you get to create it or invite it with others. It is up to the participant to take the minimal step of naming the topic and then working with whoever decides to come join that group. As I see it, whether as an open space participant, or as a student driver, a key practice in adult passage is taking responsibility for one’s learning. It is an attitude. A disposition to cultivate. An invitation to commit to doing something with one’s curiosity.

Mamma Mia!

Tenneson Woolf  is a TAO Blogger and facilitator, workshop leader, speaker, and writer. He works globally. He designs and lead meetings in participative formats. To help people be smart together. To get people interacting with each other — learning together, building relationships, and focused on projects. To get deeper to the heart of what matters. From strategic visioning with boards to large conference design. Living systems, self-organization, and emergence inspire his work. He resides in Lindon, Utah. 

Tennenson can be found at Tenneson Woolf in both Twitter and Facebook.

I am in my here and now, writing.  You are in your here and now, reading.  And yet somehow these words connect us.  I am still not sure what the relationship between the artist and the audience is.  As an artist, if you think about the audience while you are actually “doing IT” this seems a distraction.  The IT must be your entire focus.  Yet something does happen by way of extraordinary rapport.  Audience and artist seem elevated into some third condition of being, inclusive of the two, but synergistically much, much greater.  The conjuring forth of this third, more inclusive entity is amazing enough when audience and artist are in the same proximity: a pianist, for example, with her audience in a concert hall.  But when audience and artist are separated byspace and time, as in the case of writing and reading, we seem to enter into the body of a miraculous transpersonal being, confined neither to body, nor to space, nor to time, but somehow effecting a nonlocal rapport that moves us as much as a lover’s touch. 

The first time I consciously realized this was when a couple of soprano friends of mine wanted to create a performance piece with a few of my poems.  In the audience, as they performed, I had the strange sensation of hearing something that had I created, but not from the point-of-view of the creator.  Writing a poem is like being in the eye of a hurricane, everything is extremely calm, and yet emotions and thoughts are flying with tremendous velocity all around you.  In the audience, I experienced that emotional velocity in a way that I never had as the creator.  You could say I felt the poetry’s force, whereas before I was totally one with that potency, and did not feel it as a thing exterior to myself.  Since the poetry was me, it did not impinge upon me.  Yet when it came to me from the outer, not the inner environment, the affect was almost overwhelming.  Then I thought: "This is what the audience experiences when that connection is made.”  I don’t however think that this is something that the artist “does.”  I think the experience emerges spontaneously from the field effect of artist/audience.

Field effects, as we know from even an elementary understanding of current theories in physics, are nonlocal, and elsewhere in these postings I have referred to such wierdnesses as intrusions of 4th-dimensional effects into our 3-dimensional world. (New Ideas About the Fourth Dimension Parts One and Two)  If that is so, we can see that the unity which we experience as artist and audience cannot be said to have originated in the artist’s personal imagination and then transmitted to the audience.  In the unified 4th-dimensional space, the two — audience and artist — are one, and the audience has much to do with what an artist calls his or her inspiration.  In other words, you, as audience, in your space and time, join with me, as artist, in my space and time, not only when you read these words, but also as I write them.  In a sense, we each go out of our minds, so that we may both be one in the field of Creative Mind.

Let me illustrate further.  I recently served as a page-turner for a pianist friend, where she gave an extraordinary performance of one of Bach’s partitas.  At some point, transported by the pianist’s performance and Bach’s music, I left my body, and traveled to some Bachian Heaven sustained now by who knows how many performers and listeners.  The next day I wrote the following poem, which seemed somehow to come from that place that paradoxically is no place at all.

Sonata Without Sound©

Written October 17th, 2013

If when we try to string together

These long, ecstatic moments of first light,

These spirits, clothed in white, who trail

Their platinum shine through our stunned minds,

Dragging night shadows with them as they move,

If we should see what happens when sound grows silence,

Collected into beings, no part of us,

Except that part now purified by bliss,

If here, just here and now, in this sky palace

Of the non-existent, precise particular,

We should, for these moments, extract ourselves from flesh,

And being nothing, join them as they dance,

All intricate, burgeoning brightness,

Each holding a certain note of a certain pitch,

And stepping with a certain rhythmic step,

Then we would know what breathes beyond the noise,

Then, being nothing, we might rest in joy.

Pianist, poem, Bach, listeners, readers: together they produce what St. Augustine called radiance, a perfect stasis of perfected mutual emotions, wherein art shines with a celestial transparence.

Yet, as wondrous as this merging is when it expresses as art, it may be that this same effect also radiates from the teacher/student relationship, and from the relationship of healer to healed.  The effect may derive from the parent/child relationship, especially when the mother cares for the child and the two form that bond of provider and provided for, which we call “Providential” when we speak of it as the Divine.  Often this radiance arises in the form of what C.G. Jung called “synchronicities,” in which a person or persons and their environment merge into what suddenly functions as one sentient thing.  Since these events seem a-causal, we often call them miracles.  Most people, at sometime or other in their lives, experience these moments in which what they desire arises spontaneously from the environment, as though the environment had been scanning itself for an entity which would enable it to express some longed-for condition of existence.  I realize I am anthropomorphizing here, but I am doing it deliberately because from both sides — person and environment, or artist and audience — there seems to be intention.

This thing, this Being, that we call art, or learning, or healing or even love, carries us out of ourselves and into a glittering awareness where our rapport becomes so intense that it pulls us out of the 3-d prison of flesh bodies, and allows us for a moment to inhabit some vaster parental space where desire ends in instantaneous fulfillment.  I write for you.  You read for me.  The connection we make is the milk supplied by the spirit of our mutual longing for what is written. 

Roy Dean Doughty is the author or A Monument of Wonders, a literary work combining poetry and fiction, which explores the marriage of language, consciousness and time.  As a daily practice conducted in conjunction with his Kryia meditation, he has also written a poem every day for more than twenty years.  He is the creator of The Ten Thousand Poem Project and the author of  Fourteen Poems, Yodo International Press, 1987, Clear Mo(u)rning, and Spirit Chronologies. His work has been featured on “The Oneness Program” KEST Radio, San Francisco, VoiceAmerica Radio, Phoenix, Arizona, and Unity, FM radio.  He can also be read at www.doughtyspoetry.com, www.doughtysjamesjoyce.com, and www.doughtysbrainfood.com. 

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Maestro, please, some creepy Twilight Zone music.  We are about to enter a domain so weird and so common that most of us never give it a second thought, until . . . well, until our three-dimensional habitat is inadequate to our needs or explanations.  And then — whoosh! — as if from on high, something strange enters our world and gives us the very thing we have been seeking.  Some call it synchronicity, some call it miracle, some call it intuition, some inspiration, some emergent properties bubbled forth from the quantum foam, but I want to present an idea here that these inexplicable phenomena are actually intrusions from a hyperspace that exists above our three-dimensional world.  Skeptics among you will fold your arms at this point and say something like: “Typical of a poet, wanting us to believe something on faith, not on facts.”  But I would ask for a suspension of disbelief while I present my case of why facts are never going to be relevant in these situations, and that we will get much farther in our inquiries by the operation of certain linguistic levers, some puffs of smoke, and some fancy fan-dancing of the now you see it now you don’t variety.  In brief, in part one of this essay, I will attempt to fleetingly reveal by inference and innuendo why a fourth dimension must exist, and how we experience it from our ordinary three-dimensional perspective.  After all magic is a practice, not a theory or a belief, and we poet-magicians must turn our hunches into Universal Laws, not in order to obey them, but so we can put them to creative use.  Already perhaps you have perceived that a sleight of mind is happening here in which the word “poet” has subtly usurped the power usually reserved for physicists, a rabbit which will come out of the hat to your amazement, even more brazenly at the conclusion of Part Two of this farrago.

Every good game has its rules, so let’s start with the rules that we know about three dimensions, i.e., the line, the plane, and the volume.  Every move from a one-dimensional line to a two-dimensional plane and from a two-dimensional plane to a three- dimensional volume involves a one-degree increase of freedom.  From the domain of a line there can be no evidence of a plane.  From the domain of a plane, there can be no evidence for three-dimensional space.  Thus every intrusion of a higher dimensional vector to a lower one will either seem like a miracle, or conversely, like any other phenomenon of the lower domain.  That is, the miracle will be destroyed by claims of fraud or remain unsubstantiated by whatever passes for scientific rigor in that particular dimension’s definition of facts.  UFO’s will become “swamp gas,” crop circles will become “hoaxes,” and synchronicities will become “coincidences” explicable by the application of laws pertaining to large numbers.  (There is another weirdness here, which I will mention in passing, just to make things more puzzling.  Both the scientist-skeptics and the true believers will be right, depending upon which dimension’s rules they are following.) 

Physicist Michio Kaku, in his book, Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension, has a number of illustrations of how ordinary events in higher dimensions seem impossible or look like magic in lower ones.  Here are a couple of his examples: “ . . . in three dimensions, separate rings cannot be pushed through each other until they intertwine without breaking them.  Similarly, closed, circular pieces of rope cannot be twisted into knots without cutting them. { } However, in higher dimensions, knots can easily be unraveled and rings can be intertwined  This is because there is ‘more room’ to move ropes past each other and rings into each other.”  We can infer from this that any attempt to prove 4th dimensional phenomena by three-dimensional means is going to be at best inconclusive and at worst beside the point.  How could a square on a flat plane demonstrate to itself the existence of a cube?  Ergo: by the logic of illogic we may dismiss the skeptics as being trapped in three dimensions, which makes them in our game, both out of bounds, and very poor sports.  If we want answers here, or more properly, not answers, but experience, we have to turn to those much more tricky and elusive figures, who still lurk at the margins of our culture, and this we will do when we post Part Two of our 4-D excursion.

End part one

As a daily practice conducted in conjunction with his Kryia meditation, Roy Dean Doughty has written a poem every day for more than twenty years.  He is the creator of The Ten Thousand Poem Project and the author of  Fourteen Poems, Yodo International Press, 1987, Clear Mo(u)rning, and Spirit Chronologies. His work has been featured on “The Oneness Program” KEST Radio, San Francisco, VoiceAmerica Radio, Phoenix, Arizona, and Unity, FM radio.  He can also be read at www.doughtyspoetry.com, www.doughtysjamesjoyce.com, and www.doughtysbrainfood.com. 

Look for Roy Doughty's powerful online course, "Creativity" starting October 4th — Offered through The TAO Metaversity.

Featured Images copyright Jeff Clay / Clayhaus Photography