THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY PROJECT

Chime Costello | June 26, 2023

Total Journal Entry Word Count: 2,405

1. Is every unfolding into an explicate order, just a continued enfolding in the implicate order, but one
that happens at a size and speed that allows us to feel it is completed?

2. Is humanity collectively evolved enough and capable of understanding that all things are
interconnected, and even more importantly, capable of the insight needed to truly value what that
means?

3. If mutual participation is a fundamental aspect of systems, does not being present change the entire
course of a system? Is not participating a form of participating?

4. If freedom is the absence of needing to choose and/or challenge, can freedom exist without all of
humanity being free at once? And by extension of that, can individual freedom exist, and if it can, is it
reserved only for those privileged enough to not know fear, poverty, hunger, etc.?

5. If love is compassion and insight, what is forgiveness? Is it self-compassion, is it necessary for the
collective good, or is it an extension of thought and felts and a way of placating our
memories/thinking, thereby reinforcing the same processes that don’t serve us?

6. If stress in the body can be caused by the memory of stress, meaning a body holds old trauma, how
would one begin to heal and repair the same systems that were shaped by the traumatic memories?

7. If all systems in the universe impact one another, is an individual's free will largely the inspiration or
consequence of someone else's choices? Are any choices we make truly ours alone, if real freedom is
the absence of choosing?
 PART TWO: JOURNAL ENTRIES

Week One | May 21, 2023

Give up the illusion that the world is created of separate, unrelated forces. - Senge

For a long time, I’ve been wanting to keep a journal. I love to write. It’s complicated for me though, and I
haven’t found a way to commit to it, to make it a real practice. For these next few weeks, I am excited to be
given space for that here. I want to frame each week around a quote that really struck me, or helped guide my
learning.

A week ago, I was named the Interim Executive Director of a Reform Jewish congregation north of Chicago
that serves just over 400 households. I shared this in my initial discussion post. What I didn’t share is how
enormous a challenge this is. The organization is a mess, everything is on fire, and everyone is looking to me
to put the systems in place that are so desperately needed there. I am so scared of failing them. So scared of
failing school because I am being pulled in so many directions. I feel pretty lost, and also, everything I am
doing is incredibly fulfilling.

So, when I opened The Fifth Discipline for the first time, I was skeptical that I could connect with the reading
because in every way I feel so behind. From the first sentence though, I completely fell into the material –
hooked, inspired, ready to learn. Every single thing I was reading related to my work, and even more, it was
infused with a kind of beauty that only comes from someone loving their craft. Peter Senge obviously loves his
craft.

The concepts of learning organizations, which encourage expansive thinking, and systems thinking, and the
five disciplines made me feel so hopeful about how it may be possible to shift into a new way of approaching
the work ahead. Although what I keep returning to is “an organization’s commitment to and capacity for
learning can be no greater than that of its members.” Wow. Yes. And how do I, someone completely new to
this group and these dynamics, understand the capacity of this group? It all feels complicated, but I am really
excited to learn everything that I can in these next few weeks and to fall into the interconnectedness of it all.

Week Two | May 27, 2023

The scientist cannot capture the whole cosmos in thought. In his mind, he makes a kind of microcosm, which
we see as an analog of the cosmos. In this way, we try to get a feeling for the whole. - Bohm

It’s hard to begin this journal entry. I have so many thoughts all rushing in, wanting to be affirmed, claimed,
and unpacked. I LOVED the material this week, felt connected to it, and sensed my place in the wholeness of
things. Since I was little, I took great comfort in how small I am in the universe. I am drawn to the chaos, but
also to the order I can’t see, the invisible truths that I will never know. If I could pull back the curtain and
know them all, I would.
While the idea of interconnectedness is beautiful to me, I find it difficult to deeply connect to people and
things. I left home when I was 15, a home where I rarely felt safe or seen, and in some ways have felt like a
ghost ever since. Feeling truly connected is in some ways the work I need to do in the world.

What Bohm’s words and work give me, is a space of intersection between the ideas of reality, presence, God,
mutual dependency, thought, and my love of beauty, artistry, and stillness. I chose the quote at the top of this
entry because it reminded me of my trip to Iceland a few years ago. I had timed the trip hoping to see the
northern lights and photograph them (photography is one of my great loves). The entire trip was magical and
otherworldly, but when I did get to see the northern lights, I cried. I know there is science behind the
phenomenon, and data to explain it. But Bohm’s explanations of enfolding and unfolding were the best way of
describing this dance of light in the universe. The light disappears and reappears and all that was in that
moment was also in me. And maybe that is the closest I will ever come to that knowing. Or maybe that was
just the beginning and there is so much more knowing to come.

Week Three | June 2, 2023

Freedom makes possible a creative perception of new orders of necessity. – Bohm

All of our readings in this class have felt so entirely true to me, so important to my journey in organizational
leadership, and so necessary. I attended a conference a couple of years ago, where a speaker was discussing
one’s highest and best use. I reflect on this often, because it really struck me that my highest and best use is not
always what I think it is and not always what others think it should be. Often, as both a human and a leader, I
need to be trusted to have agency over what this means. So when I read the section in On Dialogue about the
impulse of necessity, I felt the words deeply.

I work in an environment where so much is perceived as being on fire all the time. There are conflicting
priorities, complicated dynamics, and the very best intentions. It’s really, really hard work, and while I don’t
think any of the issues are unique to this congregation, or non-profits in general, or institutions in general,
these are the particular fires that I need to name and extinguish.

And that is why, just as the question about highest and best use has become so important to me and my work,
so too will the question, is it absolutely necessary? I think this question is imperative and timely. How will we
ever be free to engage in meaningful dialogue if we are always thinking that everything is on fire? And what
could this, would this look like, if we were free to create new orders of necessity?

This is the third week in a row where I am so excited to share the readings with those in leadership whom I am
trying to build relationships with. I’m new to them, and this presents challenges as well as a clean slate of
sorts. I am able to ask this group to fundamentally change the conversation. It’s intimidating, exciting, and
truly the work that is meaningful to me.

I am still on a path with organizational leadership that isn’t entirely clear to me and I wish I could see where it
all goes, to know and understand where I’m headed. Maybe it is important that I don’t know though, so that
my highest and best use has the freedom to unfold in its own time.

Week Four | June 8, 2023

But it might be useful to introduce the word ‘felt’, to say there are feelings and ‘felts’. – Bohm

My dad enlisted as a Marine during the Vietnam War to escape how bad things were at home. He chose war
over a home where he never felt loved and never felt safe. During the war, he was awarded the Silver Star for
bravery. He came back from the war, splintered. For the rest of his life (he passed away when he was 59) he
was a seeker – seeking peace, wholeness, and transcendence. He found teachers who could guide him and
followed Buddhism and Ram Dass. He wanted, so badly, to achieve enlightenment and break free of this world
and the world in his head.

But he never knew peace or wholeness. All of the fear he had known before he went to the war, he brought
back as rage. And all of that rage became the home I lived in. All of that seeking, became the framework for a
philosophy void of anything gentle and loving. My dad rejected feelings, which he referred to as his ego,
because of his felts, never allowing for the possibility that the rejection of any part of him was the rejection of
all of him.

Since the first moment that I read the syllabus, I have wished that I could talk to him about this class, about
thought as a system, fragmentation, and wholeness. He never brought Bohm up to me and I’m curious whether
he was familiar with his work. I don’t know. It’s easy to romanticize what that could have looked like, that
there was a conversation that could have been had that would have made it all make sense, or would take the
pain away. For either one of us.

I felt compelled to write about my dad in one journal entry because he is so much a part of this class for me.
That also makes this the hardest entry to write. I have so much more thinking to do and material to explore
about all of this but wanted to share my thoughts here, which I know are my feelings, which are so heart-tied to
my felts.
Week Five | June 14, 2023

The source is always now. - Bohm

I am curled up in a ball on the couch, having just finished our reading for this week. I am feeling a sense of
sadness about what I read and am trying to make sense of why: last night I felt very vulnerable and had to
revisit recent heartbreak and have carried that into today, I didn’t sleep well because I was reliving that hurt,
and as I was reading, I felt a sense of hopelessness about the material while I simultaneously was trying to stay
present for it.

As best as I can trace the root of this sadness, it’s that I don’t know how to stop thinking about thoughts.
Everything that we have been reading is very powerful for me and very aligned with the best of the teachings
that I grew up with, which are a part of my understanding of how to be in the world. But this understanding is
inextricably tied to memory, and as an extension of that, trauma. Bohm writes about the stress in the body that
is born of memory, how that cannot be separated from the intellect, and how a body functions. This is painfully
true. Where does that leave me though? Does that mean that my system, my consciousness, is broken? What if
I can’t escape this muscle memory of trauma and fear and it is impossible to be free? If freedom is the absence
of challenges and choice, and freedom is unencumbered, how can I possibly participate and be present for it?
My body is holding truths that I can’t reconcile and others that I can’t even remember. So how do I ever find
the source?

Rereading this, I am aware of assumptions that I am making about myself as both the observer and observed. I
get it, I really do. This recognition though, doesn’t bring me a sense of clarity. It just makes me feel lost.

Week Six | June 20, 2023

I am on vacation in Santa Fe, and had my first experience being in a float tank. It is something that I’ve always
wanted to try – the absence of outside stimulation of any kind, floating in total darkness. It was amazing.
While I was in the tank, my thoughts turned to our readings - thought as a system, the systems all around me in
that moment, proprioception, memory, and meditation. It was many things, all at once.

I can’t remember what triggered it (I really have tried), but the first memory that came up for me in the tank
was being at the circus when I was a little girl. I used to love the circus, the wonder of it, the majesty of the
animals, the magic of the acrobats. And then I heard water drip into the tank, from condensation I think. And
that brought me to a cave in Tulum, where I was half submerged in water and also in darkness, listening to the
bats high above fluttering their wings, and also that same sound of water falling from above. And then
proprioception. What are the times that I’ve been most aware of my body, and even more importantly, when
I’ve been aware of my body without judgment for what it is or feels like, or lacks? And the fragmented
thinking that I have around my self-image, the lack of proprioception in my thinking – or worse, recognizing it
and feeling helpless to stop it, which brings me to meditation, and how I would love (so much) to have a
meditative practice, but I can’t get out of my head enough for that to happen.

And then I was back. One with the water. Aware that the systems within me were impacting all the systems in
that little tank – the rise and fall of the water with my breathing, my temperature impacting the temperature of
the water and the air, the darkness behind my eyelids mirroring the black of the space.

Week Seven | June 21, 2023

All boundaries, national boundaries included, are fundamentally arbitrary.

I traveled to Israel for the first time in 2011. While I will never experience being an astronaut, seeing Earth as a
distant thing, beautiful and whole, that trip to Israel changed the way that I see the whole of the world, and
time as it relates to our collective past, present, and future – forever. I had readied myself for being in a place
with a recorded history that far outdates our own. It was that, and it was also stepping inside an ancient rhythm
that flows through that entire region, which is something that I appreciated much more deeply than I could
possibly understand it.

In Jerusalem, the streets are built over the old city – streets that are older still, channels, markets, homes, and
sacred ground. There is a night show at the Tower of David in Jerusalem that was one of the most incredible
things I’ve ever seen. It tells the story of Israel through thousands of years, using a series of images projected
on the walls. I was mesmerized. It was one of the most powerful things that I’ve ever seen. Between this
experience, and traveling through different parts of the country, I learned about different periods when the land
was controlled by different groups – the British, the Romans, the Assyrians, and on and on – all of whom
shared different motivations and valued different resources. They conquered the land and held it as long as
they could until someone else conquered the land. They killed, they rose to power, and they burned it all down.
The boundaries drawn and redrawn over the centuries.
What I realized, watching the lights dancing on the walls tell this incredible story, is how long history really is,
how vast and expansive, and how civilization as we know it is only ever that. It’s only how we know it. We
can’t know or hold the ephemeral. We are not owed that and we can’t claim it. How amazing is that?