CRAZY TIGER ENLIVENS HUMANS

By Diane Saint, M.A.

You have a birthright.

Various enlivened individuals have called it Creative Fire, the Poetic Look, or Fourfold Vision. It is experienced by human beings living under any conditions you can imagine, and transcends culture, language, personality, and notions of talent or intelligence. We can be so vibrantly alive, and can occupy such diverse psychic and emotional spaces from one moment to the next within an individual life, and between one individual and the next within a community, that there would seem to be no end to the shapes our lives can take, and we have simply to rejoice at finding ourselves alive. Did you find yourself fully alive today?

If you found yourself answering that question, then I invite you to notice what you brought to the answer. Did your response bubble up quickly and freely? Was it a slow and thoughtful pondering? Did your answer raise another question? Or did it have a ring of finality to it? This kind of reflection is one example of exploring what might be called our "manner with which," and, as Dr. Rodney Donaldson of Crazy Tiger Institute suggests, how we do what we do is who we become, and, in the long run, matters more than the goals we pursue. Inquiring into our manner with which requires honesty, not certainty, and is one of the keys to living nondualistically. It seems that the life-giving waters for humans have to do with our relating, and it matters how we relate. If the courage to be genuine, to live nondualistically, isn’t present, then our relations become like a stream that dribbles away before it reaches a river or an ocean. There is hardly any current, barely any movement, and it cannot support life.

All too often in our daily life we become stranded in manners of living that do not nourish us. Even if we feel uneasy with the familiar game of parroting and smiling in the right places, as we continue to live that way its thorny claw gets its grip on us. I know. I have played that game. The same phrases get repeated over and over again (‘walk the talk,’ ‘push the envelope,’ ‘get on the same page,’ etc.). We do not clearly comprehend the consequences of living this way, and any poetry on the fly, the stuff of authenticity and spontaneity, what Ursula LeGuin calls the Mothertongue, is squashed flatter than a pancake. It was like waking up from one of those catnaps that I didn’t know I was taking, when I discerned that I was in the presence of someone who could help me do what I already wanted to do: reclaim my life.

The offerings of Dr. Rodney Donaldson’s Crazy Tiger Institute for the Cultivation of Living Systemic Understanding & Design constitute a provocative invitation: "to become more human, with understanding." Located in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood, Crazy Tiger Institute offers courses of a caliber that is rare and is becoming rarer in the "information age." The focus is not information, but understanding. But what is truly remarkable is how, as a teacher, Rodney refuses to take you as a human being for granted. The degree of respect and attentiveness you will find in his company is unusual and beautiful. And as you go deeper and deeper into his series of courses, you come to see that that respect and attentiveness arises precisely out of an understanding of what humanness really consists in, both biologically and socially.

The classes are experientially rich. We are not talking about lectures and one-way communication. You may as likely be asked to listen to music as to examine plant life, to read poetry aloud or to attend to the behavior of kittens. Above all, you are invited to attend to the behavior of yourself.

It is one of the vagaries of life that you cannot know that certain levels of lived understanding are possible until you meet a human being who lives them. For me, Rodney is that person. In his own case, he was lucky enough to study intimately with three such human beings: anthropologist Gregory Bateson, cybernetician Heinz Von Foerster, and neurophilosopher Humberto Maturana--easily the three most comprehensive systems theorists of our time. (Rodney has edited volumes of both Bateson’s and Maturana’s essays.) Rodney has taken the works of these three mentors as a point of departure for a series of courses that take a student further and further into exploring perception, cognition, language, and behavior in the student’s own daily life through highly inventive and imaginative assignments. What the student uncovers through engaging with these assignments produces insights that transform his or her living. I know. It certainly has transformed mine.

Having spent years exploring the relationship between explanation and experience, Rodney is immune to any temptation to let scientific verbiage replace lived understanding. Unlike most people with his intellectual sophistication, Rodney is too inventive, his mind too mercurial and too attuned to the minute particulars, to spawn a school of thought, a method, or a technique. With every word and gesture, he attempts to open another’s eyes to the multidimensionality of their being.

Nondualistic living is not about knowing the right answers to questions that have been hanging around for a long time. In fact, with every challenging assignment, usually an experiential exploration of some aspect of your everyday life, Rodney charms, teases, cajoles, argues, tempts, and invites you into a state of not knowing. There is no straining to be "compassionate" or "good" or "correct." Simply find yourself doing what you do, and then reflect. With every encounter you will find yourself relaxing into who you are and, thereby, becoming more fully yourself. It is a simple and subtle shift to not just self acceptance, but a generous self acceptance, that has a profound rippling effect.

     "Dr. Donaldson has edited and continues to edit Gregory Bateson's posthumously published works, and I have chosen him as editor of a collection of my own essays. The volume of Bateson's essays entitled A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind edited by Dr. Donaldson (and so far published in four languages) has been praised by scholars all over the world. I am myself impressed with the high quality of the work he is doing with my essays."

     "I have had the good fortune of meeting in two separate occasions (several years apart) with Dr. Donaldson's classes.... I have been in both occasions greatly impressed by the high human and academic quality of what he does as a teacher. The students of Dr. Donaldson experience a deep transformation as social beings and receive a first quality training in the matters of cybernetics and systems theory. The students of Dr. Donaldson grow in his classes as responsible and conscious citizens and serious scholars. I have also seen Dr. Donaldson's students in international conferences, and I have been happily impressed by the quality of their contributions. Indeed, Dr. Donaldson is able to teach humanness and inspire social and academic responsibility in his students in a manner that has become rare in our times."

     "A remarkable teacher and scholar."

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