My mind tends to look for systems in the workings of the world. Over the years, the work of many individuals have caught my attention.

Buckminster Fuller explored the geometry of structure and found ways to apply his discoveries productively.

Goethe, best known for his literary work, was also a scientist. His approach differed from that of Newton, a contemporary. His Metamorphosis of Plants describes three stages of expansion and contraction that all plants exhibit in going from seed to leaf, to flower, to seed. Some books that explore his scientific method are Henri Bortoft’s The Wholeness of Nature and Craig Holdrege‘s writing.

Stafford Beer developed the Viable System Mode (VSM). These words from his book, Think Before You Think, summarizes it better than I could.

According to the cybernetic model of any viable system, there are five necessary and sufficient subsystems interactively involved in any organism or organization that is capable of maintaining its identity independently of other such organisms within a shared environment. This ‘set of rules’ will therefore apply to an organism such as a human being, or to an organization consisting of human beings such as the State. The comparison is made not by way of analogy, but, as has already been explained, because the rules were developed to account for viability in any survival-worthy system at all.

Stafford Beer worked closely with Salvador Allende soon after became president of Chile, to use this model to manage information for the government. There’s a good description in his Wikipedia entry. However, Allende was brutally overthrown by a US-backed army before the model could be tested.

John Godolphin (J. G.) Bennett was an explorer. He served in some British foreign service capacity in Turkey  (if I recall correctly). He was one of few who learned the local languages and interacted with the local cultures. He met Gurdjieff, who became a strong influence in Bennett’s life. Bennett had other influences later in his life including Subud and Sivapuri Baba. Bennett developed Systematics, a study of systems. He posited that each level of complexity (monads – systems with but one component, dyads, triads, etc.) had intrinsic characteristics, which he attempted to describe.

His ideas have been productively applied in some corners of the corporate world that encourage long-range thinking informing the activities of a corporate entity. One vein was work done by Charles Krone through Krone Associates, which had many corporate clients, including DuPont, my father’s long-time employer. My father was in the part of the organization charged with to implanting Systematics into the DuPont organization.

Richard Knowles (once manager for a DuPont Plant in Appalachia) has found that his “Process Enneagram” can be a powerful and useful tool, when applied with ongoing focus, toward keeping an organization on track across a wide range of considerations. In this way an organization can be more nimble in that it is open to a greater variety of ways of taking on what comes its way.

Shyam Bhatnagar and Harish Johari.  Both taught about the chakras. The blog post on “Chakra Psychology” talks of each 6 or 7 years of our life serving as ground for one of our chakras to be in the forefront of our development. Tantra, Ayurveda and other traditions offer many valuable tools to conscious development.

Kabir & Camille Helminski are Mevlevi Sufis. They organized summertime retreats primarily for a community that had a base in SE Vermont at the time. The retreats were held at Burke Academy, when its skiing school was inactive. I met a community working together in spirit. My wife tells me I came back from time with the Sufis open to her in ways she valued.

Others – to be continued …