Islands of Excellence

I have never been afraid of the word INDIVIDUAL, never have, never will be.  Since I utilize the online space as a learning space and Toastmasters as an offline space for that same learning journey, my thinking about who I am as an individual has dramatically transformed.

There is no debate in my mind between the specialist and generalist, for we need islands of excellence and we also have a choice to broaden our individual perspective about I-Land.  An I-land is like a promised land - except it is based on the fulfillment of our own promise.  The promise we make as a group is fundamentally different to the promise we have within us.

Ultimately, the root that this promise should bring us to is originality and in this regard I am really glad that Adam Grant is getting a lot of attention for his work on Originality.

Adam Grant has been quite vocal recently also about Myers Briggs For some MBTI is a part of their lifestyle or even life way and it is what makes them relate to the world, because for whatever reason they like MBTI having 16 boxes to fit people into for them is a means of deciding who people are.   I have a different way of coming to this world, it just happens for me eyes are a window into a person's soul and that is not the be and end all of their being.  At a group level we may hum this together as our collective BEEING simply because we are on beBee, but that is followership rather than originality for me.  Ultimately the root of Myers Briggs is not the mother or daughter who fashioned it after the work of Jung, it is Jung and his own notion and nuances that propelled him to consider the individual in the first place. 

I value Carl Jung's originality because what does it matter to me to know that I can be INTP yesterday and ENFP tomorrow - for those states are but a snapshot of my being.  Of course it is impossible for me to be all things to all people but that is an identity in G-land not an originality in I-land.

In the perfect world I would have found my soul-mate and we would find our own personal island and just like the movie I would embrace the romantic notion of "you complete me"

Yet there is a problem with that romanticism and it is called our own mortality and our mortality is wrapped up in the genes that get passed from generation to generation.  If we want to create a narcissistic I-Land then we don't have to worry what "our love" means to our offspring.  What "complete" means here is completion as an end and not complete as a wholeness of thinking.  That is why Carl Jung's Psychological Types is a neat bedside companion, MBTI creates finger food for the masses when the nutrition is a book which matures and grows as we age - our propensity is so strong to define the group that we are extroverted in a manner where extroverted and introverted becomes for me a euphemism for perverted.  Jung took 20 years to try to write a book on the inclinations that inform the human condition.  It took the 20th Century but a moment to discover Edward Bernays to create what is today has accelerated as the conditioned human.  Yes we need the group, but a group should not be groupthink, it should a fractal of the individual - and the word individual has a meaning which means "being whole".

BEEING WHOLE

A hive in that respect is a network of intelligence but a hive mind is groupthink - do we really think that our mind is the hive, if we do that is the manifestation which Carl Jung worried about. Yet a mind and being that is free does not have to lose sight of what bee's have in a hive - and what they have is a network intelligence.  The pity today is that by network we mean today Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, beBee, Slack, Tumblr etc etc.  At the group mind level that is true, but at the level of the individual, the hive is a network of intelligence that is a connected hexagon of millions of I-lands.  The trouble is that we are afraid of being individual for the same reason Carl Jung wanted to know through his types why the bias has been the manifestation of groups.

Now if all I did was use the word BEEING in a cult capacity rather than how that word helps my own Being, then I have lost my I-land.  Every student in my club is a student first and then they can declare themselves a toastmaster or whatever belief system they choose - because the essence of a Toastmasters education is owning our own opinion and being treated as an individual learner and not as a group mind.

I am then an Island of Excellence that is literally an I-Land, where I means undivided and whole and that reaching for wholeness is not the product of a few years of education but the emergence from a lifetime of continuous learning - of always being rather than attaining ends.  This is where members of a Toastmasters club can lose sight of the individual when the system of awards are meant to boost the esteem.  How can I find esteem in gratification of receiving an award or a distinction, I can only find esteem in finding an education.  I am not in the business of simply telling those students a simple formula for success or a way of being that is culture, for then they have put my esteem on a pedestal and from that there is no education only idolatry.

I am not a follower of Jiddu Krishnamurti for the simple reason he thought such following is the making of a dull existence and he did not believe in such following, but he also spoke truth to the point where it is impractical to mirror his thinking, even if we arrived at an original frame of reference.  What I do is respect the way he arrives at Truth and very few people are remotely capable of arriving at this point, but this point expresses itself in what I think of as education.  What Krishnamurti thought of education is what he came to by thinking about what is, and I have barely begun to think about what is - because I am still very much a by-product of group effects.  Krishnamurti was taken away by the Theosophic Society and later in life when he broke away from that Society to find his own freedom - he had the advantage of being truly individual.

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