Chapter 2: Embracing Creative Tension
“Nothing evolves mechanically, and that which cannot evolve consciously has to degenerate.” – G.I. Gurdjieff, In Search of Being
In the previous chapter, we explored how our evolving roles are nested within larger living systems, such as our team within an organization, or our family within a community. Now, we turn to the next discipline: embracing creative tension. This work moves us beyond seeing wholes to sensing the dynamic forces that shape them.
As proposed, understanding is at the heart of what may separate us from AI, requiring more than knowledge and function—it calls on will and being, the deeper dimensions of human experience introduced in the Triad of Experience.
The discipline of embracing creative tension correlates to being. It has to do with how we interact with a system in the process of developing a deeper understanding of them and ourselves within them. For our purposes here, we’ll explore the connection between this discipline of embracing creative tension and the dyad in Bennett’s Systematics. The transition from the monad (one term) to the dyad (two term) is about working to understand the dynamic patterns of a system—understanding it in terms of both its existence (what it is) and its potential (what it is being called to become).
One way to think of the relationship between existence and potential is as the relationship between two musical notes. Creative tension arises in the dissonance between them, a pull toward harmony and resolution. This tension is not a flaw; it’s the creative force through which evolution unfolds. This framing provides a clue as to our potential role as humans: sensing tension in this way requires a form of deep listening that current AIs, and arguably future AIs as well, are not capable of. We can think about this form of listening as a form of tuning in to the more subtle patterns of movement and energy that can’t be captured through data-driven analysis alone.
What does it mean to listen in this way? How does this lead to a deeper understanding of the complex living systems we live and work within? To answer these questions, we’ll first need to understand what prevents us from such listening.
The Fear of Discomfort
In the process of writing this chapter, I’m realizing just how often I am deaf to this dissonance, this creative tension, this call to potential. What prevents me from “hearing” it?
For each of the six disciplines we will outline in this book, I will propose a primary obstacle (based on the work of Carol Sanford though not representative of it). For Seeing Wholes, the obstacle was fragmentation. For Embracing Creative Tension, it is fear.
I’ll share my own experience with the aim of making this practical, encouraging you as always to reflect on your experience. In my case, it is difficult to admit to myself, not to mention to others, all the ways I am letting fear get the best of me. Here is part of my own process of working through it. How does fear turn me away from hearing the call to potential? One place to start in this context is the fear of discomfort. Tension and dissonance are unsettling by nature.
I can see that despite theoretically knowing the value of discomfort, in practice I stay quite busy avoiding it. I distract myself in a thousand different ways. There is an abundance of noise that drowns out the sound I’m failing to hear—both external noise and perhaps more importantly, the noise of my own internal narrators. Even though such distractions often produce some level of stress and anxiety, there is relative comfort in them compared to facing the music.
This begins to reveal a critical aspect of our work ahead: creating space to let go of our distractions and listen on a deeper level to the world around us. To reiterate a key point of this shift from accumulating knowledge to developing understanding: this is about learning to slow down in a world that is telling us we need to speed up to keep up.
Personally, I find this very challenging. The cultural messaging we hear is strong: learn more, learn faster, it’s a race and if you’re not running at full speed, you are falling behind. Yet the experience is exhausting. We are burning ourselves out. What if our future roles have more to do with our ability to slow down and listen more deeply than they do with racing ahead?
Take a moment to reflect on this for you personally. How do you tend to avoid the discomfort of facing the music? What unconscious, sophisticated strategies do you use to distract yourself? What happens as you start to shine a light on them?
Embracing Creative Tension in Place
Let’s make this concrete. As you read the following, reflect on your own context, holding in mind the image you created in the previous chapter of the nested systems you’ve chosen to focus on for your evolving roles.
My wife, two kids and I live in a house on a family farm in the Maule Valley of Chile. We built the house about 10 years ago, right before our first child was born. There is an area around the house which includes a small oak forest and some open space. One way to frame this is using the Nested Systems framework is as follows:
What is required of me to begin working to understand this unique context, so that I may evolve my own value-adding roles within it?
“Identification of content does not guarantee understanding of pattern… For the dyad, one typically finds that an important pattern is the tension between the structure itself and the structure’s relationship with the larger world.” – J.G. Bennett, Elementary Systematics
Beginning with the household, we can see that on one hand is the structure itself: an arrangement of building materials, furniture, decorations, plants, and in this case four human beings. These are the facts of this place—its existence. Yet it also has a relationship to the outside world: it is a home base from which we emerge to engage, and to which we return to reconnect. In this way, the household has a potential unique value-adding role within the larger system.
How does the polarity between existence and potential of the household produce creative tension? How do I experience it?
As I hold these nested systems together as a whole, questions emerge which generate this creative tension by illuminating a gap. For example:
What potential role does the farm play in the Maule Valley?
What potential role does the area around the house play in supporting the farm to evolve in this direction?
What potential role does the household play in developing the area around the house?
Holding these questions as a whole, what potential role do I play in the household?
As I work through this, I can sense new energy which is both exciting and unsettling at the same time. While I don’t have definitive answers to these questions, I can sense there is potential there, calling to me to explore further.
As you work through your own set of nested systems, what is coming up for you?
Fear of Uncertainty
Another fear I can recognize as an obstacle to embracing creative tension is the fear of uncertainty. Part of us will always prefer comfort and certainty to wrestling with such questions. That’s human. Yet arguably, there is no real possibility of comfort and certainty. In our attempts to remain in such a state, we can only create bubbles where we marinate in our unfaced fears. Life’s inherent complexity and uncertainty become hidden behind our fragile delusions.
How do we begin to work on breaking out of our bubbles of delusion and distraction, learning to embrace the inherent complexity and uncertainty of life?
A core principle in this work is that transformation occurs in the light of consciousness and understanding. In other words, instead of approaching this aim by adding new programming (insert new best practice here), we look to see these patterns more clearly and understand them on a deeper level. Where do they come from? What effect do they have?
For example, I can begin to see that my own fear of discomfort and uncertainty is a product of a cultural experience. As did many, I grew up in a culture where these things were to be avoided. Comfort, convenience, and entertainment were highly valued. In school, for example, having the right answer was the primary goal. Status was gained by being right. The whole system was designed around becoming comfortable and confident knowers, groomed for success in a knowledge economy.
One could make the case that not long ago, this set of values was relatively effective (though never without its consequences). Things were far more stable and predictable than they are today. Career paths were well-defined. You could put your head down, work hard, follow the program and become “successful.” The mantra was knowledge is power. Accumulate knowledge, then gain access to the Expert Class where you will live in comfort. For many, this is still the Dream.
Pause to reflect for a moment. How do you think this has changed? What is unique about this moment in history?
One obvious difference is that looking toward the future today, there are no clear paths to follow. We can’t simply put our heads down, trust the system and follow the program to success. A good case can be made that we have never faced this degree of uncertainty in human history. We are staring down some very uncomfortable possibilities: human obsolescence, new forms of slavery, even potential extinction. Courage is needed to face the fear of such outcomes and transform it into wise action. Turning away from this fear, hiding in our bubbles of relative comfort and false senses of certainty, is likely to be disastrous.
Of course, this is a lot easier said than done. There are many subtle ways to avoid doing the work. I can recognize, for example, the possibility of using this writing project as a strategy for giving myself the feeling of progress, when it is really only another distraction from truly facing the music. I may also fall prey to that deep-seated desire to experience the comfort of the Expert Class, if I am not carefully observing myself through this process. The allure of being “one who knows” is very real for someone who came up in a culture where this was a central goal.
False Personality and Essence
Another critical shift in thinking about emerging roles has to do with what Gurdjieff called essence. Here, the dyad of false personality and essence offers a powerful lens.
Essence represents an inherent pattern unique to us as individuals (or as living systems). Carol Sanford writes of this in her book Indirect Work:
“For the human mind, managing complexity (as opposed to complicatedness) requires discerning the source of what makes things whole and intelligible. I call this discernment process revealing the essence of something. To reveal essence, I seek to understand the working of a whole, by which I mean how it goes about playing a contributing role within the value-adding process of a larger whole. When I look across time, I find that I can recognize certain characteristic patterns in the roles that a living system will choose and the ways it goes about playing them. This gives me insight into its essence.”
False personality, on the other hand, is the product of our programming. As we grow up, this personality grows around our essence, which remains often hidden and underdeveloped. We develop personas based on the ideas and stories we’ve gathered through our experience about who we are, or who we should be.
One way to think about these personas is like masks we wear, concealing our true selves. Another way is to think of them as internal narrators, repeating stories (or more often, fragments of stories) we’ve picked up from here and there along the way. As a result, we find ourselves in a fragmented state, full of internal contradictions, disconnected from who we are as a whole. We also find ourselves thinking about roles in terms of pre-conceived labels or job titles, limited in number rather than as infinite and unique.
In the context of an emerging AI-integrated world, we find our pre-conceived ideas of roles in a state of profound disruption, which is likely to only intensify moving forward. Our work is not simply to discover new roles, but to think differently about roles themselves. Maurice Nicoll illustrates one way to frame this transition in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: Vol. 1:
“[A person] is born with essence and that is real and is the living germ in him, but it can only develop by itself to a very small extent. Personality must then form itself around essence and essence has no chance to grow further unless this personality forms itself round essence. But if a man remains in that state which we have called the second stage—namely, in which personality is now active in him—he is not yet a man and is comparable with an acorn or a seed that has formed around itself nourishment for its eventual development. The third stage of a man is when he comes to make his personality passive so that the essence in him can grow.”
So the framing of this transition is from what Nicoll calls the second stage to that of the third stage: where our false personality becomes “passive” and we begin to develop our unique and authentic self, or our essence. Yet as Sanford points out, this is not simply a matter of navel-gazing (which makes this Work distinct from those who talk about uniqueness and authenticity and self-actualization in a way that only breeds narcissism—more on this later). Essence, in contrast, is a pattern of interaction and value-adding relationship. It is a core role which calls to us uniquely, based on who we are at the depths of our being, specific to the places we live and work within and to what we are being called to contribute here.
Fear of Lost Identity
This presents a third type of fear which relates closely to the first two, or to the fear of discomfort and uncertainty. This is the fear of lost identity. In other words, we become very attached to certain aspects of false personality, or certain ideas of roles, which prevent us from doing this essential work.
For example, A recent coaching client was facing the possibility of losing his job. His fear was not only about income, but losing his sense of identity which was wrapped up in his work. As he learned to observe this fear, it began to dissolve and new potential began to emerge. He realized that this fear had been blinding him to new possibilities. Many of us today, if not all of us, are facing a similar challenge as AI technology advances. To the degree we are identified with our current roles, we face the possibility of losing this sense of identity as they disappear. Who will we be then?
We can see that no expert can answer these questions for us. We have to be willing to do this work ourselves.
Getting to Work
In our exercise in the Introduction, we focused on the core practice of Self-Observation using the Triad of Experience framework (Will Being Function). Here we’ll add to this with another core practice, which Gurdjieff called Self-Remembering.
There’s much more to say about this practice, but Nicoll offers a clear starting point:
“The technical definition of Self-Remembering is expressed by two arrows, thus
“It means that one looks out and looks in simultaneously. We ‘see’ the impressions coming from [the system] and ‘see’ our own reactions to it together. This increased state of consciousness is Self-Remembering.”
As we re-engage with the world around us, specifically these nested systems we’ve identified for our work, here is a challenge:
Practice Self-Remembering as you experience and interact with these systems, observing simultaneously the system directly through your own sense impressions, as well as your reaction to these incoming impressions.
Recall our framing of developing understanding as increasing the quality of our experience and participation within a system. That’s what we’re working on here. We’re learning to engage with the world around us on a more conscious level.
When we start to combine this with looking through specific framework lenses, we start to notice things we’ve been missing. Our understanding begins to evolve. Insights emerge. For the moment and near future, practice this with the Nested Systems framework, working to see the systems you perceive through this lens. At the same time, ask yourself, “what is this system being called to become by the larger system? What is calling on me to become?” Observe how this practice impacts the quality of your experience and participation.
To reiterate, none of this is designed to be easy or produce easy answers. We’ll have to struggle against those parts of us that grow uneasy and impatient in the face of uncertainty. I make no claim to struggle less than you do. We’ll have to learn to hold these questions as guiding lights, helping us develop a deeper understanding of the roles we’re being called to as we continue to evolve our capacity for doing this Work. These are not capabilities that are developed overnight.
As you practice, expect to forget. Expect distraction. Use your developmental infrastructure—your reminders, notes, and rituals—to help you return to these disciplines. Record insights as they arise. Above all, approach this work with patience and humility. Learning to hold tension consciously is at the heart of transformation.
What’s coming up for you as you practice interacting with your nested systems in this way?
How are you experiencing the creative tension between existence and potential? Between your own essence and false personality?
Where does the fear of discomfort, uncertainty, and lost identity show up?
What effect does shining the light of consciousness on this fear have on the quality of your experience and participation?
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