Deep learning

[Marilyn Mehlmann]

Moonlight in Stockholm. The cool light presages winter, but for now it’s still almost summer. Our pellets-fired heating system still sleeps, the hot water comes to us solar heated. Most of the pot plants are still outside on vacation; one pink geranium is just reining in from a flowering gallop – 22 flower heads!

As nature slows down, the work/workshop season hots up. Some of the discussion on this site seems to be about accelerated learning: how can we – collectively – learn fast enough to make the crucial difference? To create or uncover our new heaven-on-earth, before an undesired new earth emerges from our follies?

Or is this image in itself a folly, an attempt to impose modernistic linear thinking on an inevitably cyclical process?

I don’t know. But coming from a background in psychosynthesis, I’m accustomed to looking for dysfunctional patterns of personal belief, thought, behaviour… and to asking what other patterns might be preferable. Some years ago, Nadia McLaren and I started exploring how these concepts could be applied to groups rather than individuals – teams, projects, businesses, communities. A small group coalesced around the ideas, and we came up with the concept of a ’pattern laboratory’.

Accelerated learning has to be (doesn't it?) about breaking moulds, instant enlightenment, quantum leaps; what Warren Ziegler (bless him) also called Deep Learning. It’s one reason I’m currently enjoying the book by quantum physicist Amit Goswami, 'The Visionary Window'.

On 5-6 October we will have a pattern lab in Kiev, to learn from – with – an educational project. The proposed focus is partnership. This will be a first of its kind. We’re hoping for some deep learning!

Maybe nature isn’t as cyclical as we imagine? – maybe that’s another belief to challenge? Perhaps the spiral is a better image? So: is the spiral widening or narrowing, is it going up or down? Does it matter? Moonlight reflections in Stockholm.