Structure & Space

Just because we see empty does not mean that space is empty and the same is true of our mind.  Just because we engage meditation to silence our mind, we are filling our mind with meditative noise in order not to think.  Our minds like space are never empty.  Our organizations are never empty but it is we who can learn to see this.  Even when we are "spaced out", there is a lot going on which we are not conscious about :

An organization is connection of organs which serve professional and managerial functions but what we miss by focusing on entropic organization is ability to imagine a syntropic organization. As a society we are enamoured by entropy because disorder is easier to see and more visceral and observable than order is.  It is much more challenging to envision syntropy.  Before we get to syntropy, let's first review some basics about entropy :

Through an entropic lens we can see that spontaneity is not intelligent, indeed it is a casual factor in the creation of disorder.  Through this lens we keep our focus on the unhealthy, the sick and the dysfunctional.  We are further conditioned by media, politics, healthcare and education to view the world as a place of disorder.  We are drawn to disorder first rather than what I think should be the principal or primary lens of focus, which should be order.  A short 2 minute+ video details why education teaches only entropy and not syntropy :

The traditional mindset continues to look for problems and management consultants do the same as surgeons to the body, they go in and treat the organization or human body as an array of parts, and while division of labour is an effective strategy, it is not unhealthy as looking for what does not work.  Our lives are mitigated on disorder and we know that because news that provides us evidence of order is watched by so few, but sensational news stories of disorder garner out attention and keep us glued to what is going wrong with the world.  This does not mean that we look through rose coloured glasses and sing kum-by-ya my lord, because there is much that is wrong with the world, but focusing on the entropy simply makes us experts in entropy and why do we want to major as masters of disaster.  If syntropy is an examination of order and a mindset that looks at structure and space through this lens, has anyone applied syntropy for successful outcomes.  The answer is yes and one example is from the merger of agriculture and forests - an outcome that was envisioned by people who looked at our world in terms of what could work and how that could lead to abundant rather than scarce outcomes :

Think now the structure and space we create when our focus is entropic.  In the video above we can see what structure and space looks like when our focus is syntropic.  The 20th Century should have been the century where we closed the book on disorder being the primary focus.  When we do that our unintended consequences are disorder.  That is because intention was involved in what was unintended and therefore we worked against nature rather than with it.

Today space is represented by the virtual and not just air or outer space. Due to the continuation of how we thought in the 20th Century, the virtual space is becoming more and more an abject version of what people call the real world - where the irony is that a focus on disorder is not a focus on the real world.  It is a focus that creates an unreal world and the chief reason we are not focused on syntropy is that so much more of efforts to make a living are based on an economic system which rewards entropy. 

Maybe we have got better at waste disposal or better at reducing climate effects or better at recognizing we are damaging water resources as well as soil and getting better at creating livable cities - but we are not remotely close to living in a more human centric world.  We are living in the past and profiting from that rear view mirror - and if a few are now being educated in incredible technologies and feats of science and engineering, this is the domain of genius minds and not the domain of ordinary mortals like ourselves.  At least with those developments which represent accelerated change, that should alert us that our collective approach is the opposite to that which is now converting innovation into advances that make us even more fearful about the future.  That is because we have been conditioned to focus on disorder and because disorder is the easier path to learn from and the path where hangs the low hanging fruit.

While the spontaneity in habits and living entirely spontaneously is not leading us to a healthy outcome, that does not mean that spontaneity is necessarily bad.  In Zen Buddhism there is a way to spontaneity which stems from a discipline, one that Alan Watts discusses in his talk "Hesitation or Spontaneity" :