Internship Internship: Five Months Residency with The Club of Budapest Semester Hrs. 12 Objective: Participate with others in quest for wholeness in daily living Documentation: Sign off by Ervin Laszlo Evaluation: Doctoral Committee I participated with the Holistic Alliance, a creation of the system theorist Ervin Laszlo. He proposed a coming together of people with various backgrounds who have a common desire to inquire into comprehensive views which take into account the complexities of the occasions we are in that require a new approach to the way humanity is living on this earth. The essence of this alliance's aim is that a change in perception would emerge in daily life, causing philosophical understanding in the action of daily living. Internship The Club of Budapest April 23—Sept. 22, 1997. My internship with The Club Of Budapest was divided between organizational, participatory, and experiential roles. When Dr. Ervin Laszlo first called me in Oregon to confirm his invitation, he told me that my role would be to work with e-mail in his network. However, when I arrived in his office in Budapest he gave me another role; I was asked to be a coordinator for the Club's Regional Consciousness Centers. Laszlo asked me to write a letter introducing myself and informing the Regional Consciousness Centers of four upcoming conferences to be presented in Budapest, Hungary. I informed this network who they could contact. Thereafter, every month, of my internship I drafted a general message to the network. Another of my roles was as an organizer for The First Creative Members Conference. I had never worked in an office and, therefore I learned an array of skills, including the use of fax machines, and e-mail. The latter, I might add, was quite crude in Hungary. The deputy Andras Laszlo told us at one of our monthly briefings that it took about a year to plan for a conferences; as this attempt at a grass roots organization by Laszlo and colleagues was run on a shoestring his statement turned out to be bitterly-sweetly true. For a variety of reasons, I worked on a seven days a week schedule. At Laszlo's first conference held from May 12-15, 1996 I listened to several presentations by scholars, United Nations members, and the so called "Creative Members". Every presentation was limited to 30 minutes. The conference was divided into Plenary Roundtable's and Creative Workshops. Some very definitely contributed to my learning experience, while others with whom I had already developed a familiarity, were a pleasurable reinforcement , e. g., Yehudi Mehuhin's heart felt speech about the human situation on this planet. Menuhin's most remarkable statement was that the most important function of educators is to teach children the ethics of interrelationships. Robert Muller former United Nations Secretary was another colorful presenter. Dr. Laszlo asked his members to present possible solutions that would help the mission of the Club Of Budapest, and these included solving problems in daily living. Here is a brief rendition of my own suggestions: 1. Include and support the work of those who have already laid out the groundwork on views for Wholeness. 2. Seek and encourage open discourse on controversial issues, i. e. climate change and health questions. The intuitive thinker Barbara Mcclintock supported and encouraged the retrovirus researcher Deusberg, The University California at Berkeley, to continue to question the conventional wisdom of HIV positive as being "The cause of AIDS". Another example is the Climate Question. In this saga of "A Tale Of Two Cities" is climate truly warming up because of human activity, or as a consequence of a combination of human folly and natural evolution is there another Ice Age emerging. 3. I proposed, the exploration of the limitation of our thought process at the individual and group levels. For example, my work has been the exploration of thought in a dialogue group that was proposed by theoretical physicist Dr. David Bohm and his colleagues Don Factor and Peter Garret. In this group exploration there is no leader, facilitator, or agenda. For those interested about this perspective I recommend the study of Bohm's Thought As A System The second Conference was canceled due to The Dalai Lama's health. The third Conference was held Sept. 17-21 by The International Society For The Systems Sciences (ISSS) conference was about contemporary systems concepts. Dr. Fred Wood presented his paper on the "Future Of The 21st Century", and it was most interesting to listen to the dialogue by veteran systems theorists about the direction anticipated for the ISSS. Critical systems theorist Michael Jackson spoke eloquently about future prospects for a human emancipatory systems theory, and Hal Lindstone --a former industrialist and Emeritus at Portland State University in Oregon-- presented his view on complexity and mentioned in passing that despite the tragic mistakes that have been made along the millennia humanity has made progress. Although I contributed to many of the last conference's co-ordinations, due to the financial difficulties of The Club of Budapest I was not able to stay for conference. My experiential learning was the most rewarding. Different Hungarians offered to show me the city and consequently I was able appreciate much of Hungary's history. I also spent some time reading the club member's more recent books. Laszlo's The Cosmic Creation posits an alternative hypothesis to David Bohm's Implicate order. In retrospect, it is most satisfactory to learn that out that The Club Of Budapest followed up on one of my suggestions: The Buckminster Fuller's web page was included in the links component of their web site. Overall my involvement with the Budapest Club in its beginning stages of organization was invaluable. I am quite certain that their informal organization of creativeness represented by artists, scientists and spiritually minded people will make a significant contribution to human evolution. |