Opening Remarks

Walther Dreher

Opening remarks

 

I started more than one decade ago after I retired from my academic work in 2006 to use the ‘world-wide-web’ under the title or Link ‘Genius-for-all.de’. It was the impulse to stay connected with colleagues and be in touch with international sources, which I cultivated for many years, personally and materially.

To do this I put most of my publications - especially smaller articles - together and arranged them topically on ‘my’ website. Some of the material had been also translated into English. With all these ‘packages’ in my ‘Rucksack’ I thought to continue paths of the past into the future, anyhow and anywhere.

 

Preceding this step, I met around 2000 Otto Scharmer and learned about his activities in the United States. I was fascinated of his work at the MIT. Besides reading parts of his work, which he sent me from time to time, just coming into being what later has been published as ‘Theory U’, I got a first insight in his way of thinking and acting when I could hold the book of Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers ‘Presence – Human Purpose and the Field of the Future’ (2004) in my hand.

The last two years at the University of Cologne I tried to let students – studying at the Heilpaedagogische Faculty, at that time Europa’s biggest Faculty for Special Education with about 5000 students -, being confronted with this idea of ‘The Field of Future’. 2005 we started a two-year project ‘Teacher-Formation-Culture, Animation pro Inclusion’ (‘LehrerIn-Bildung-Kultur, BeWEGung pro Inklusion’). Olga Lyra accompanied this two-year practical phase scientifically and evaluated it in her Doctor Thesis ‘Leaders and Creation-Responsibility. Inclusive Educational Landscape and Theory U’ (‘Führungskräfte und Gestaltungsverantwortung. Inklusive Bildungslandschaften und die Theorie U’, 2012). But somehow it seemed that time hadn’t yet come and it was too short to affect the students’ studies strongly.

 

Continuing intensively my epistemologically understanding of Otto Scharmers ‘Theory U’, practically or actually trying to continue and to collect experiences with the ‘U-process’ while joining publicly offered U-labs, Conferences and specific sessions and meeting virtually people from all around the world let me come to know basic human questions beyond what I reflected and acted for a long time in my smaller study field. I became aware that I had to empty my Rucksack from its contents archived on my homepage. I felt we all have to become much more a kind of ‘dialogue partner’ in those communities like the ‘Presencing Institute’ struggling for ‘Transformation’, expressed for example intentionally and somehow dramatically after the Global Forum 2021.

 

I decided to take all my writings in German out of my homepage. Cleaning out my Rucksack in this way doesn’t mean to ignore all those treasures I have collected during my academic life. Contrarywise it was like falling scales from my eyes when I became aware how a grounded awakening of a ‘sleeping epistemological knowledge’, - which guided me as a ‘path-searcher’ through all my life – suddenly became an immense power to look on myself. It was, as Otto Scharmer underlines, that the beam of consciousness could be turned on myself and let me recognize that a great shift occurs in our Being or better ‘Seeing through the world’ (Jeremy Johnson). What does this mean?

 

Since the end of the 1970ies Jean Gebser – who had passed away in 1973 -, became an outstanding philosophical and spiritual companion. But it is only now that his opus magnum ‘Ursprung und Gegenwart’ (‘The Ever-Present Origin’) becomes the base of what can be expressed as ‘a catastrophe (overturning) of consciousness’ (Johnson, 2019, 22). What more than four decades worked or rumored or slept in myself – similarly to the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ -, suddenly was revitalized through Jeremy Johnsons book ‘Seeing Through the World’ and what he offers in his classes in ‘Nura Learning’ (https://www.nuralearning.com/mission.html).

 

Now it seems as if ‘I have been born for this moment’ to participate in GAIA-Journeys, to articulate Questions as Lighthouses, to become ‘permeable’ for what is going to emerge out of the future – involution – and for what wants to become diaphanous through transformation of an Awakening of Consciousness – evolution -, and to recognize a world without opposite (Welt ohne Gegenüber) which asks – in addition to ‘Questions as Lighthouses – for ‘Answers’, Re-sponses and therefore ‘Re-sponsibilty’.

 

The variety of ‘Questions as Lighthouses’ corresponds to a variety of ‘Answers’. They might be given not in a systematic manner but as a colorful ‘Florilegium’ which becomes more and more manifolded with each new reply. ‘Florilegium’ is a picture I found in Jeremy Johnsons writings. He himself refers to Maria Papova and quotes:
“FLORILEGIUM… ‘a gathering of flowers’ as a prelude to what she describes as the ‘combinatorial creativity’ and ‘networked knowledge’ of digital remixed culture” (Johnson, 2019, 177).

 

It is liberating to get on this way in dialogue with topics on the one side – establishing Questions as Lighthouses all over the Globe - and to get answers – as signs to ‘flag’ harbors for returning home, resting for a while and start for new ‘Ithakas’, as C. P. Cavafy let us participate in his poem (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51296/ithaka-56d22eef917ec).

 

I am going to enter my open exchange with the ‘Symbol’ of our time: The ‘Sphere of Being’ (EPO, 410). For Gebser ‘Sphere’ is the ‘Signatur’ or ‘Sign’ of our days.

 

• Sphere ‘Theory U’ and Sphere ‘The Ever-Present Origin’
• Sphere ‘An integral view on my personal Vita’
• Sphere ‘Florilegium’ – creating -topian places for encounters and for diaphanous involuting and evolving Sources.
• It’s a special privilege that Web-Pages allow to add pictures for illustrating ideas without exemption (only respecting the Copy Rights). Jayce Pei Yu Lees drawings are touching examples of such ‘Spheres’.

 

 

During the first session of the Fukushima Wastewater team on July 20th, 2021 Cecile Masera created the following drawing – may be unconsciously following or drawn by the ‘involving’ Source:

 

Cecile Masera, July 2021

 

Which GENIUS might help us to communicate and rebuild the ‘ETERNAL NATURAL CIRCLE OF LIFE AND CIRCLE OF WATER’?

 

GENIUS – this keyword is born out of my academic teaching and research work. Entering 1975 with a general view of Education the field of ‘Special Education’ – in German we used at that time still the term ‘Heilpaedagogik’ – I felt from the beginning a heavy burden to talk about people as ‘geistig-behindert’, mentally retarded.

 

Though I followed largely myself and for a long time this view I tried to overcome it. Jean Gebser guided me to recognize the narrow perspective of the mental-rational categories being imposed on so called ‘Geistig-Behinderte’ (Mentally Handicapped). I became slowly aware how our mental-rational consciousness was and still is violating the connectedness with the world as a ‘holon’ or can’t follow David Bohms view of ‘separation without separateness’ (Jaworski, Source, 2012, 72).

The question here is not to ‘restore’ terms or to deny the problems of people with ‘special needs’ - a term which has also to be reviewed and discussed -, but to ‘re-think’ our ‘thinking’as Collin Tudge recommends and perhaps to find to a ‘re-naissance’ of our ‘Being in the world’, to new ‘Spheres of Being’.

 

GENIUS as Acronym might impulse ways of being connected:

G - as Global or Grounded … E - as Education, Ethic, Ecology … I – as Inclusion, Integral … U – as Universal or universal…

 

And not to overview: GENIUS for all – including nature