Birthday response

A huge thank you for the many birthday greetings I received.

I am not one to celebrate birthdays publically.

I spent my birthday week-end mostly in silent mediation and fasting or recouping my energy so I can better serve the world.

Part of my birthday is time out of time. (that is what Barry Oshry of the OD Seeing Systems” fame calls it) It is a reflective time. It is what Tom Dick and I do with clients. Each New Years and on my birthday I scan my life and plan my next year.

It has been a fantastic 6 months. I have just incredible client opportunities to develop further my whole system transformation intervention.

I truly expect the next year to be the “best ever” in my life.

Why?

Because I have my discipline more refined than ever. With the exception of the addiction to the Vikings football team only when they are winning, I mostly have disconnected from the material world. I live in a Divine Life that serves others through my work/play. I spend as much of my free time in meditation as I can. Why? As I told my daughter, Arielle, at my birthday party last night, I am only ever 7 minutes to 7 seconds from ecstasy. I do not know of anyone in my State of Minnesota that can say such. And the Beatles, Obama or Mike Jackson clearly could not say as much.

In this next year, I wish to move my Self/SELF from ecstasy to bliss on a more regular basis.

One of my commitments for personal growth is to listen each day to video’s, audio’s and readings of Swami Krishananda right on my Iphone. He is a philosopher who held the top spot in the Divine Life Ashram after Sivananda left his body in the early 60’s. I have read nearly 300 of Sivananda’s books. I have practiced his life style daily since 1962 and beginning around 1965 have read brief articles from Krishananda in his monthly publication that were sent post mail from India until recently.

Here is my key insight from watching a video of Krishananda yesterday.

*****Meditation is consciousness (my small self as part of the whole SELF /God) concentrating in/on consciousness (the Whole SELF becoming one with my small self).*****

And all the above brings my Christian Being alive with the sound of music. All the above helps me stay committed to transform my ill brother as he heals up from being on the Jubb/Cousens live food diet.

Each day I reflect how little time I have left in my body.
And my birthday helps me remember that my conscious small Self is eternal. Meditation has taken me to the other side of Life as my favored “Moody Blues” sing.

I end with quotes that have been on my mind of late.

“Dream your Life, Live your Dream”, E. Hugh Pettman: LIFE CENTRE Chairman, my Australian Mate.

Dreams are not seen when you sleep. Dreams are those that do not let you sleep. Hon’ble Shri Narendra Modi, Chief Minister, Gujarat and top inspiration behind the first India LIFE CENTRE / Gujarat Vittal Innovation City. And potential client.

Whole System Transformation friends

John J. Scherer is a leadership and organization effectiveness consultant, executive coach, author, and seminar leader based in Seattle, WA, and Krakow, Poland. He has been conducting whole system transformation initiatives with large and small systems for 20 years. Before beginning his work in this field, he was a Combat Officer in the US Navy, a Lutheran Chaplain at Cornell University, and Co-Creator of one of the first graduate programs in applied behavioral science. His books include Parables (1973), Work and the Human Spirit (1993), and Five Questions that Change Everything. He has chapters in Practicing Organization Development, The Many Facets of Leadership, The Promise of Diversity, Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work, and others.

Ginger Whitson is a Senior Organizational Effectiveness Consultant for a household named company that has a major stadium named after it. She has a passion for helping leaders and organizations continuously transform, expanding their capacity to get the results most important to them. Over the past two years, she has been part of team of internal and external consultants that have led a very successful whole system transformation initiative that has driven significant improvements in business results and shifted the culture in positive ways. Ginger is a graduate of the Becoming a Better Intervener Program at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland.

Both Ginger and John wrote the following about yours truly.

Roland Sullivan is the person who named ‘whole system transformation’ in the mid-1970’s. He has conducted literally hundreds of WST initiatives since then with small, family-owned businesses, large multi-national corporations, and even entire countries. As Co-Editor of each edition Practicing Organization Development, the ‘bible’ in the field of OD, he is mastering the field and knows virtually everyone leading in this work. Recently, he has begun to gather on video the important conceptual models of change and transformation, delivered by the most experienced consultants who use them. Based in Minneapolis, MN, Roland has been a tireless force in developing OD awareness and capability in Asia, especially China, India, Thailand and The Philippines, through an organization he co-founded, The Asia OD Network.

For my three favorite associates ( Bader, Zaucha and Miller) who have a passion for diversity and inclusion:

A synthesis of my words and Swami Krishnananda’s:

We do not reject any school of thought, because we consider that each doctrine, each philosophy, each phase of religion is a developmental difference in the evolutionary process of every one and everything to the Absolute. Be all and end all. I agree with Chardin, Christ, Shankara, Ramakrishnana, Obama, Bush, Nimbarka and Vallabha, the Pratyabhijna system. I agree with Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Bader, Berkeley, and Hume, as well as Kant, Kostenbaum, Cooperidder, Agyris and Hegel and S. Freud and Maslow. We see no contradiction. Every spectrum of the crystal is beautiful, every petal of the rose is charming, and every ray of the rising sun is a call to life and rejuvenation and transformation and GOD!

This is new for me.. before today, i never liked Freud.

My post to ODN list serve today:

I have a degree in philosophy, as well I am one of the senior social psychologists of the world. I say such so you can appreciate my being influenced by a quote from a great philosopher. I read Dr. David Cooperidder’s thesis on appreciative inquiry (AI) before he submitted it. I wanted so much to just focus on the positive. I attempted to be as pure AI as i could until just a few years ago. Many founders (Barry Johnson-Rev. John Scherer) of OD believed that one must also deal with the shadow side of a client’s world. Agryris who has influenced my deepest social psychology and Applied Behavioral Science Whole System Transformation ™ methodology especially wants to deal with the undiscussables” and the unhappy side. The following quote that i read this morning supports the both side, whole view or the value of paradox.

It is from Swami Krishnananda, who for me is my favorite complete spiritualist and philosopher. He and I are direct disciples of Swami Sivananda.

Here it is for your reflection.
“All through my adventure of managing The Divine Life Society, I had kept in my mind not to omit any aspect unnoticed, but bring into the fold of my consideration every aspect – financial, social, ethical, and spiritual, all at the same time. In my meditations I adopt the same method, I leave no thought aside as unworthy, because the rejected thought also is a thought and so it will refuse to be so easily rejected, since every thought is connected with its opposite; the synthesis of all these thoughts would amount to a cosmic thought, a total thought. Every possible thought of the universe will resound with equal status, and there will be an all-glorious universal meditation. This should keep one perpetually in the positive mood of complete attunement with God Almighty.”

www.swami-krishnananda.org/aubio/mylife_3.html

He also has my stance of Wholeness. He looks at everything from every view!!!

He and another or so dozen direct disciples of Dr. Sivananda are my primary motivation for transforming my own dear Child of GOD SELF. ( I just told a potential 100,000 member client system who is the most profitable in their industry that I request their help in helping me model self transformation.)

I know u all have been in dialogue around large conferences. Well, Dannenmiller taught me to bring out the dissatisfaction ( the sad) and what was working ( the happy). Just heard her on tape this week, when she and I presented at a National OD Conference, say that the cause for transformation is partially due to dealing with dissatisfaction, vision and first steps. She said Beckhard believed that such reduced resistance to change but she said it caused the magic or transformation.

Thanks Master Rev. Scherer and the wise one – William LeGray for the recognition!!

Change and transformation

ter.com>
Subject: Re: [Odnet] ‘Planned Change’
To: Patrick Dufour , Terrence Seamon
, OD Network
Message-ID:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”ISO-8859-1″

Patrick,

Must be synchronicity at work. . . Here’s a chunk of copy from my latest
newsletter:

?Planned Change?
When I first became aware of the field of Applied Behavioral Science in the
late 1960?s, a new term was emerging: ?planned change?. I vividly remember
running across a set of four or five booklets on ?Change? from Alcoa in 1968
and devouring them in a single reading. As I romped through the pages,
excited beyond words, I was having that magical feeling?I am sure you know
it, too?that what I was reading would change my life. And it did. Those
booklets were soon joined by a small library of more academic books with
titles like The Dynamics of Planned Change (1958), The Planning of Change
(1961), and Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution
(1974).

The huge ?A-ha!? or flash of insight these people were revealing was that
things didn?t have to simply happen the way they always happened.
Things?individuals, teams and even entire human systems?could change. Not
only that, but those changes could be intended, planned and even made to
happen!

Looking back, I realize that moment was the next step in a search for what I
was meant to do with my life. Within a year, the universe presented me with
an opportunity to develop one of the first graduate programs in the field
that was designed from the ground up to equip people to do the work of
planned change: The LIOS Masters of Arts Degree in Applied Behavioral
Science, offered then through Whitworth College in Spokane, WA. The decision
to take that step resulted in my leaving the (Lutheran) parish ministry to
explore?and hopefully apply?this new field of ?planned change? to the
arenas of life that concerned me the most: relationships.

Once I got started, the focus of my work itself changed, and I began to work
with larger and larger systems, first entire family systems, then groups and
finally organizations. One of the things I learned early on, something that
has permeated my coaching and consulting from individuals all the way to
large multi-national corporations, is that there is change, and there is
CHANGE. I soon learned what to call those two phenomena. . .

First Order and Second Order Change
?First Order Change? is an alteration within a state or condition, like
changing speed in first gear, or doing a more efficient job of whatever the
task is before you. ?Second Order Change,? or Transformation, is changing
the state or level, as in shifting to another gear, or getting in another
vehicle, or even heading in a completely new direction!

The options available in a (First Order) Change mindset are limited by that
?frame? or understanding of what the problem is. When a new way of seeing
the problem occurs, a whole new range of options shows up?which generates a
whole new set of ?problems? or ?opportunities,? many of which did not exist
before the shift. As Einstein is famous for saying, ?We can’t solve problems
by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.? Or, as one
of my spiritual development coaches, Amrit Desai, says, ?The way we see a
problem often IS the problem.? This is what Second Order Change
(Transformation) is all about: framing or seeing the situation in a
radically new way, thereby opening new doors and pathways for action, which
are stepped through in powerful, system-changing ways.

New Water from the Old Well
The difference between ?changing? something and ?transforming? it is that
changing implies replacing, or in some way negating, what is there now.
Transformation, on the other hand, implies reaching deep within what is
there now to find the seeds for a new shape, a new reality. It is more like
the true meaning of education: from its Latin root e-ducare, to draw out, as
in drawing water out of a well. You can think of the kind of transformation
described here as drawing new water out of your old well?by going deeper
than you ever dipped before. The way to get your bucket deeper into your
well is by taking on powerful questions, instead of jumping at
attractive-looking answers. When you wrestle with these five life-changing
questions, everything will shift inside and around you, starting with your
understanding of who you are.

John