samadhisoft.com

Walking back from coffee this morning, I realized that it’s been exactly a month since I arrived here in New Zealand on the 16th of November.

Time is a strange thing – and getting stranger as I age. A month ago, I looked at my watch and it said the 16th, today I look and it says the 16th and it is as if I’ve just reached out and torn a gossamer veil between then and now. ‘Then’ was just a moment ago – hardly any further from me than now – and now will be just a moment away on February 3rd as I’m landing in Seattle having returned from this trip.

Christchurch is a beautiful city. A dynamic brew of old and new. Walking, I’ve several times looked down to see a brass plaque affixed to a small concrete block saying something like, “This tree was planted in 1885 by so-and-so” or “The first game of Rugby was played in this park in 1863“.

Here they have the concept of protected trees. This means that the trees cannot be cut down, pruned or dealt with in any way without obtaining a resource consent from the Council first. And, yet, the city grows and is economically vibrant. Historic buildings and trees co-exist with new flats and office buildings.

They have a bus system which allows you to get to nearly anywhere in the city and it is efficient and cheap – you can ride it all day for $3.80 NZD.

I have been less than happy with my broadband Internet service since I’ve been here. I had the bad luck, apparently, to show up just as they tried a major upgrade to the system and offered new plans. The upgrade seems to have introduced problems and they are having growing pains as their service grows. I’ve called Telecom (the local Internet service provider) and complained about my DSL signal dropping every ten minutes. This has been very frustrating but I have to say that the people I’ve spoken to a Telecom have been uniformly polite and as helpful as they could be, given the unfortunate circumstances. The truth is, I’ve yet to run into anyone unpleasant here in Christchurch.

The good news, at the moment is, however, that one of the people I came in contact with on-line in the course of my agitating on this issue has found a work-around and since I’ve reset my ADSL modem according to his prescription, I’ve had no drops.

Of all the people who immigrate to New Zealand each year, only 2 to 3% of them are from the USA. But, of those I’ve talked to, the majority cite their increasing rejection of the directions the US seems to be going in. The ascendancy of right-wing political and religious conservatism in the US is driving some of her best and brightest away and that’s unfortunate for those who feel driven to leave – and for those who are left behind.

The founding principles of the US are some of the brightest acts of pragmatic idealism in human history. But, things drift and change. The deep hold of basically unfettered Capitalism on the US and the rise of hugely powerful corporations there have diluted what was the best and brightest model of nationhood on the planet. I mourn these changes as all of us who love liberty should.

I’ve been talking with Sharon, my wife, back in the US. She’s stayed home this trip to watch over our nursery business (www.woodscreeknursery.com). Last night, western Washington had a huge wind-storm and she said that this morning, eight of our 54 greenhouse had the plastic ripped right off of them.

The winter weather at home this year has been outrageous, to say the least. As I was leaving in early November, massive rains had driven many of Washington’s rivers over their all time high water flood marks and created huge chaos. Then, a week of two later, they received an enormous snow storm that threatened to crush many of our greenhouses from the weight of the heavy wet snow. Our workers labored all night pulling the snow off the greenhouse tops until there was so much snow gathered in the spaces between the sides of adjacent greenhouses that its weight was beginning to crush them in from the sides. And now, a terrible wind-storm. I feel sorry for and very grateful towards my wife who stayed home to watch things and has had to suffer through all of this while I’m enjoying the Christchurch summer.

For those of you who have discovered the wonders of ShoutCast Internet radio broadcasts, I have a couple of recommendations for you. You can catch a low bandwidth versions of Seattle’s KUOW at http://128.208.34.80:8000 and you can find an excellent New Age and Meditation music site from Auckland, New Zealand at http://207.44.154.48:8000.

I use WinAmp to listen to Shoutcast broadcasts and it is a great combination.

Cheers from Aotearoa!

On Sunday, there was a gathering of expatriates in the Christchurch area which I was very happy to be able to attend.

Most of us who were there have been in contact through a Yahoo Group called Expats-in-New-Zealand. So, it was nice to actually put some faces to the names I’ve seen on the various postings.

This group serves both those who have already immigrated to New Zealand as well as those who are still considering it. it is an excellent source of all sorts of information about New Zealand from immigration requirements to whether or not one can find Fritos here on the market shelves.

It was an interesting group of people. We had folks whose current or former careers included: an IT Project Manager, an Airline Pilot, Real Estate Agents and investors, Appaloosa Horse Breeders, a young gymnast, a Writer/Photographer, University Students, and University Professors among others. I can venture to say that it doesn’t look like there are many particularly dull people who decide to pack up and move to the other side of the world .

Kathi and Bruce, who hail from the Bay Area and have been in New Zealand for about six months, were our hosts and shared their beautiful home with us. In addition to our Bay Area representatives, we had folks from Washington, Florida, Texas, Idaho, South Africa, Portland, Chicago and Germany there. People’s time in New Zealand ranged from 2 days to 12 years.

And, did I mention that we also had a genuine Kiwi, Len, who is married to an American expatriate, there as well? Len makes his own liquor mixes and he was nice enough to share two of them with me and they were excellent!

There’s just not enough room and time to recount all of the excellent conversations I had at the party but be assured that I sincerely hope to see all of these folks again.

It was a great get-together. Here’s a couple of photos I shot at the party:

Tom & Marie’s Photos are below:

An interesting day here.  A cold front is passing over the southern half of the South Island and yet here in Christchurch, it is 27C right now (or for my US friends, that’s 82F).  And it is windy!  We just had a huge gust a few minutes ago.

Here in the apartment, I generally leave the big glass doors open at the front because I like the sound ot the traffic and the wind and it sounded pretty wild.  Sometimes, I leave one of the smaller windows open as well for cross draft but I’d just closed them a few minutes before because doors were threatening to slam.  I think if I’d have had them open during the big gust, I’d have broken some windows as they slammed open or shut.

I went out to lunch today and when I was walking home up Salisbury Street, a fellow crossed the street obviously meaning to speak to me and he asked if I had a cell phone rather urgently.  I looked to see what he was looking at and a house about four doors down from the building where I live was on fire.   We looked over the fence and the gate but they seemed locked, then we went into the neighbor’s place where they’d just noticed the smoke and she called the fire department.

Meanwhile, I went back and tried the gate a different way and found it was actually open and I went in.   Someone had set a row of Lavender bushes in the front of the house on fire and when we’d first looked, they were a roaring pyre of flames and it was easy to believe that the house itself was going up in flames but in the three minutes or so that had elapsed since then, the bushes were burning out.  The neighbor had a hose and the other fellow dragged it over and sprayed the bushes and then the house was no longer in danger.  About five minutes later, the fire department showed up and then a lady who was house sitting there and it was a bit of pandemonium with her crying and everyone milling about.   I told the firemen what I’d seen of the situation and as no one else seemed to want to talk to me, I came on home.

I’m thinking that if they’d set that fire just as the big wind gusts had come up, they could have really caused some damage to that house and the others around it.

I continued to read George Soros over lunch today and got into a new section in the book in which he refers to an insight he developed during the breakup of the Soviet Union when he and his foundations were deeply involved in trying to influence an orderly transition from a Closed Society/Central Economy into an Open Society/Capitalistic Economy.

Prior to this, he’d seen Open Societies and Closed Societies as two polar opposites. Following this, he reevaluated and decided that a better model was one in which the Open Society model sits midway between the closed and the too open extremes. He learned that a weak system with no goals for people to identify with and a huge amount of ambiguity and uncertainty can foster a desire for order and control that easily leads back into closed totalitarian systems.

This reminded me of an E-mail conversation that has been spinning out between myself and my friend, MD, over the past week in which we’d been focused on this same idea. I.e., that closed societies, wherein dogma has become ascendant, are stagnant and repressive and resist change but societies in which anything and everything goes (such as the US youth culture of the hippy 60’s), are essentially unstable because a lack sufficient structure and quickly fall apart.

But, more than this, I saw another parallel from the relatively new science of Complex Systems and Emergent Properties.

In complexity theory, new emergent properties can manifest only when the overall system is nicely balanced near the transition point between static order and dynamic disorder. Here at this border zone, the various bits and pieces which have the potential to combine to yield a new emergent something, have the flexibility to move around and find each other and to seek an emergent pattern together. Here, the disorder is not so strong that it will keep tearing the forming patterns apart before they can coalesce nor is the order so strong that the bits and pieces are locked into an existing structures within which they cannot move and flex.

The boundary between steam and ice, that we call water, is a tangible example of the idea. And this relates to the fact that for life to evolve, the sorts of molecules involved and the local conditions had to be somewhere between the molecular chaos of too much heat and the molecular rigidity of too much cold.

Much of what I know of Complexity and Emergent Properties, I learned from Waldrop’s 1992 book, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.

And finally, this entire line of thought; the correspondence between Soros’ insights, my conversations with MD and the ideas of Complexity Theory, reminded me strongly of Herman Hesse’s book, The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.

An amazingly deep book in which one of the major threads is the idea that there are profound correspondences between the various disciplines such as math, music, history, art and etc. Indeed, the ‘Glass Bead Game’, in which these correspondences are revealed is, in Hesse’s future world, the ultimate intellectual pursuit – the attempt to show and experience the interrelatedness of all things.

I’ve been reading The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror by George Soros. I like his ideas a lot.

He focuses particularly on the fallibility that necessarily arises because we humans are part of what we’re trying to understand as in when we focus on something like economics or sociology.

He claims to have made his vast fortune by recognizing the disjoint that usually occurs when people reason out what they think should happen in a given situation (like the stock market) but forget to include themselves into their calculations. He says that these ‘disjoints’ are usually recognizable to the trained eye as what we call, after-the-fact, bubbles or over-exuberance in the market. By recognizing these disjoints between our predictions and the actual reality, he’s managed to position his money in the optimum place several times in contradiction to all market wisdom and made a fortune doing it.

Soros is more than just a financier, however. He has a deep passion for truth and for improving the world and he has the resources to be able to try to do something about the state of the world. He has, over the years, established a number of foundations to try to influence national and world affairs according to his theories.

His most interesting ideas, for me, are those he has about human societies. He advocates what he calls, Open Society. In fact, he’s created the Open Society Foundation to help promote and support Open Societies world wide. It is interesting and idealistic stuff and I encourage you to follow the links I’ve provided to learn more.

But, what I’m currently thinking about is how and why Soros came up with the formulations he uses. His background is as a financier. The mental tools he’s developed over the years are those that enabled him to succeed in the markets. It is natural that he should take the tools that worked for him there and extend them into other areas like how human govern themselves.

I, on the other hand, have a deep background in the natural and biological sciences and have also spent much of my adult life deep in the mysteries of computer systems and systems thinking. So, when I approach new fields, like how humans govern themselves, I too tend to bring the tools that have served me well and try to apply them.

A very bright fellow named Samuel Hahn, once said, “Anything you can do, I can do META.” One way to look at his statement is to think that it refers to the fact that once you have two or more of something, like theories, you can compare their relative merits against each other in a meta-analysis to gain insights at a higher level.

This is a deep system thought and as such, it can bootstrap you up to new ways of looking at things. I think that it is a great failing in our educational systems that we do not teach early on the utility of reflexive recourse to meta thinking as a way to penetrate to the deeper essences or higher views of whatever is being considered.

Soros’ thinking derives from his field of expertise and while it is applied with as much integrity and compassion as anyone could wish for, I think it lacks for never having questioned if there were not other deeper ways of looking at the same questions. We are, after all, evolved biological entities. All that we’ve created in terms of markets, societies, laws, governments and culture, have been built upon the bedrock of our essential biological natures.

I’ve found myself for a long time pursuing this meta thread in everything. Attempting to deconstruct the premises at the local level into the premises that underly them at a deeper level.

I’ve convinced myself that our biology underlies most of what we do regardless of what we think the reasons for our actions are. How many times have all of us done something rather stupid and then tried (perhaps unsuccessfully) to convince ourselves that ‘we really meant to do that’. That box of cookies, that surprise pregnancy, that overdrawn credit card?

So, when we go looking for the reasons why we do things, I’m convinced that our biology is the deepest well spring we can draw from in our attempts at self understanding. And, as you may have seen before on this site, our inherent Biological Imperatives are the deepest drivers of our behavior in my opinion. Soros does an excellent job of explaining what we do but he’s light on the deep whys and without a deep understanding of the whys, it will be difficult to try to effect changes in our aggregate behaviors of the type we need to adopt if we hope to avoid the consequences of the Perfect Storm.

I picked up the phone a few minutes ago to find a lady from New Zealand Post on the line.  It seems they had a letter for me and they couldn’t read the address though the name was clear.   So, they went to the phone book where I’m listed, looked me up and gave me a call to get the right address so the letter could be delivered.

I don’t think that would happen in the USA.

I’ve completed a first draft of a long piece I call Eden Lost and posted it today here: ➡

It is one of the core pages here on the www.samadhisoft.com site. The subject matter talked about in this piece is central to the point of this site just as The Perfect Storm hypothesis and the Transcending our Biological Imperative pieces are.

These several pieces together fit into a larger causal sequence which I will explore soon.

I would ask you, dear readers, to read the Eden Lost piece and offer your comments. I’d like to know what works, what doesn’t, what was missed and what’s inappropriate or incorrect. Your help in this matter will be much appreciated.

Sincerely,

Dennis Gallagher

I love adventures – small trips off into new worlds.

Tonight, I went into the RSA (Returned Servicemens Association) here in Christchurch for dinner. It’s an economical place. $12.50 for the special, $2.00 for the Mushroom side dish and $5.00 for a glass of Chardonnay. As I ate, I read George Soros’ book, The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror, and mused over his ideas.

When I came in, I asked if the public was welcomed there in the restaurant and they said, ‘Yes, no problem’. And later, the lady who waited on me also said that if I wanted to go back into the RSA club itself where they have the bar and the Pokies, they could sign me in since I was a former serviceman.

After dinner, I took her up on the idea and I went back into the club portion of the facility and had two beers and talked to some fellows there. It’s a lot like, I think, a VFW Post in the US. Indeed, I saw several VFW banners hung there apparently from visiting Americans from various VFWs.

A bar, a lot of tables, three snooker tables, a lending library and walls covered with photographs and the stories of me who fought in the various wars that New Zealanders have participated in. The restaurant’s name was The Victoria Cross and men who’d earned the VC figured prominently in the photographs on the wall back in the club. Charles Upham, a New Zealander who is only one of three men to ever win the VC twice figured prominently there.

I met Moka first. a Brit to came out to NZ at 18 for an adventure in 1954. He spent 25 years in the NZ army and had participated in the Malaya Campaign which lasted for many years and involved suppressing a communist uprising (a bit of history I was largely unaware of). He’s got four kids and three of them currently live in Europe. One owns a restaurant in Spain.

I tool a long walk around the room, beer in hand, to read all the plaques and stories and look at their lending library. When I returned, I joined Moka at a table and met Noel and Lloyd. I never learned much about Noel but Lloyd has a welding and sheet metal business and has for 25 years. Prior to that, he built a 45 foot boat and before that he spent six months fishing and made more than he normally made in a year but it bored him. Lloyd and I discussed our businesses and how they are run and how the various responsibilities are split up.

The place was nearly empty. They said that Friday night was the big night. I could join the RSA, if I liked. Since I’d served in the military, I met the requirements.

It was a good evening. Some light bantering back and forth and for the most part I was able to follow what everyone said. Perhaps, I’m absorbing the accent a little better now.

A ten minute walk and I was home. Along the way. I admired the moon drifting behind the gossamer clouds and wondered what it was going to look like in a day or two when it was full and hanging upside down from how in looks in the northern hemisphere.

This is just a quick post saying that I’ve gone back and filled in the photographs on an earlier post having to do with my visit to my son’s place in Southern California and on the trip he and I took out to Joshua Tree National Monument. The earlier post is here: ➡