A PILGRIMAGE

The Path of Transformation

Welcome, Traveler

Part of me wanted to understand the world so I could explain to others why they were wrong. If that failed, years of martial arts training offered another solution. Fortunately, life has a way of educating us.

The desire to win arguments gradually gave way to something better: a love of learning for its own sake. Books became companions. Questions became adventures. The world revealed itself to be far more complex, mysterious, and fascinating than I had imagined. 

Over the years I accumulated a library of ideas drawn from science, philosophy, psychology, history, martial arts, literature, and the great books. Eventually a different question emerged:

What becomes of all this knowledge? 

Knowledge that is not shared dies with its owner. 

That is why this project exists. 

If you have reached this page, curiosity has already carried you farther than it carries most people. You are likely the sort of person who reads beyond the headlines, follows ideas wherever they lead, and senses that there is always more to learn. You gather knowledge from books, podcasts, conversations, and your own experience. You are not merely collecting facts. You are attempting to construct maps that more closely resemble the territory.

For that reason, I call you Traveler.

Like many others, I have spent much of my life trying to make sense of the world.

At first glance the books we shall discuss appear unrelated. Some concern science. Others philosophy, psychology, history, literature, or martial arts. Their authors lived in different centuries, spoke different languages, and pursued different goals.

Yet over time I began to notice a pattern.

Again and again, these thinkers arrived at similar conclusions. They discovered limitations in ordinary thought. They warned about confusing maps with territories, words with things, theories with reality. They emphasized observation over ideology, process over static categories, and inquiry over certainty.

The theme was present everywhere, but seldom stated clearly.

RISE2 is my attempt to make that theme explicit.

It is not a doctrine to be believed. It is an effort to identify, organize, and operationalize principles that repeatedly emerge from science, systems thinking, and the experience of those who sought to understand reality as it is rather than as they wished it to be.

The purpose of this pilgrimage is not to tell you what to think.

It is to help you examine the machinery by which thinking occurs.

Along the way we will explore culture, worldview, paradigm, science, history, and the great books. We will examine how human beings construct maps of reality and what happens when those maps cease to resemble the territory.

I do not wish to present these ideas as rhetoric or ideology. Wherever possible, I would rather show than tell. I want you to observe, compare, and draw conclusions for yourself.

Our first example comes from an unusual historical phenomenon known as the Cargo Cult.

At first glance it appears to be a story about remote islands in the Pacific.

In reality, it is a story about how human beings make sense of the world.

And it may reveal more about our own civilization than we would like to admit.

Continue → Cargo Cult