People have been asking  what @F-L-O-W is and we figured the following from our Individual @F-L-O-W Discussion Yahoo group might provide you with some insight. 

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Happy Yet?

From: Michael ( Monday, September 03, 2012 10:27 AM )

From: Jim ( September-09-12 10:30 AM )

Carlin didn’t understand the “high savings” motive structure.  We have a 4 ? year old who is incessantly focused on accumulating things.  If you allow her, she will literally sleep on top of 15-20 things, many of them hard plastic, like a little dragon.  And she is furious and very sad when you take these things away.  She wears us down; no controlling her; just trying to channel her.  This is a daily tension.

I remember when she was two…she would walk around with two fistfuls of things.

She would love to have the metaphorical equivalent of “sandwiches taped all over” her body.

From: Brian ( 09 September, 2012 10:51 )

I heard the tail end of a story about parenting and parenting styles, on our CBC radio.  A mom (high order) was telling us about her realization and transformation that happened through continuously spanking her 2-year-old daughter (high curious) who was “inappropriately” moving dirt into locations where dirt should not be, and seeing her daughter look at her in a totally perplexed manner as if she was saying…”why would you punish/hurt me from trying to discover stuff”?  She said that was the last time she ever hit her daughter, when she realized “how different our interests were”.

From: Herb ( Sun, 9 Sep 2012 11:30:01 )

Gregory Bateson reported a similar story in Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

If you put a rat in a maze, it will explore each of the rooms in the maze.  To train rats not to explore, some behaviorist set things up so that the rat would get a shock whenever it entered a room.  It didn’t work.  The rat kept exploring.  And Bateson’s conclusion was the same as in the story above.  The rat explored in order to get information, and so each time the rat entered a room it was rewarded with the information that the room was painful to enter.

From: Mike Jay ( Sunday, September 09, 2012 2:18 PM )

Yes, in Carlin’s case could be high savings, hoarding/possessing, keeping things for a rainy day (its hardwired, like curiosity, and imagine the two in combinatorial support).  hehe

Yes, and this is also key at the meta level to understand why our inbornness will triumph (hardy personality in concentration camps, a la Frankl)… but it also is a double bind, for those who depend on the intersubjective nature of the environment…

If I am independent and individual motives (vs. pattern of external referencing, some can be both or not at all, fyi)… I am not intersubjective with the environment the way that someone who is external referencing is…

What’s wrong with sleeping on hard plastic?  Won’t that be a better teacher than chastisement for not following composite rules… hehe

From: Michael ( Sun, 9 Sep 2012 14:27:29 )

OK.  And here is another view on the subject.

Sincerely, Michael

From: Mike Jay ( September-09-12 2:58 PM )

Brilliant timing…

Now, the issue is this…

In me (using baby above) are motivations that I will not understand, that will predispose me to hit back when hit, to hoard things, to seek your approval, to nurture my brothers and sisters, to want to be special, to worry a lot, to be anxious, to want to organize things, to want chaos… to never do the same things twice, to NOT PICK UP MY CLOTHES, to not be clean, to want to be clean, to be disgusted with things, to tolerate almost anything, to be narrow-minded, to be lazy, to be ambitious, to be stubborn, persistent, and egomaniacal, to roughhouse, to play nice, to wander off, to never leave your side, to love my parents, to see them as a barrier, to be close-minded, to be focused, to be in space…

These and all the other things are IN ME already, how they get expressed and the people I help and hurt along the way is both my challenge and your opportunity… help me learn about myself… help me understand why I am this way, why I am different…

Help me create my own standards to live by, in view of those I must live by…don’t tell me I can be anything I want to be, help protect me from THEM who would condition me to want for myself and not my needs for others.

Help me to realize I am born with gifts, sometimes hard to find, but to learn using them.  Don’t make me learn things that I don’t need to know, but is part of your world’s needs…  Help me remain in my talents.  Teach me how they can be used for good…  Teach me to understand systems dynamics, so I am not alone in this world.  Teach me not to be self-reliant.  Teach me how to play and work with and through others.  Teach me to share my discovery with others and to invite them to discover and share with me.

Most of all, teach me to unconditionally accept myself and to unconditionally accept others, and to smile and be in awe at our differences, and not seek sameness, but fairness and realize we are all in this together and each of us has a duty, a responsibility to be accountable for who we are and how our gifts manifest for the good, beauty, and truth in others…

If I can’t find a way to be free in the world, based on who I am under my circumstances, scaffold me into a structure where I can still be happy, and innovate ways for me to be productive, to pay part of my way for the scaffolding I need…

I’m an experiment in life, I’m perfect as I am.  Help me find ways to align with the world, through knowledge of myself; giving me the freedom to learn what I need to learn my way; and help me innovate in the world, so that all gifts can be monetized for the greater good…  And finally…help me to realize the happiness that is inborn in me… and make success an emergent phenomena, not my grail…  And help me realize that by the grace of God go I… and that most of what happens I didn’t cause, nor would I take the credit…

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