Chapter 5.
RHYTHM AND FLOW: A SET OF GUIDELINES

Each person discovers for himself or herself the way to create and grow a theory and how to apply it. Each person "theorizes" in a unique way.

Some people get their theory first through the head. A woman once wrote me from Hawaii saying that something I had said in a talk had appealed to her intellectually; she had applied it and changed her way of relating to her children. Others get it first through the heart or gut, having to be touched emotionally before they "see" the theory. Some seem to know what is happening to them and want to understand the process at all levels. Others seem comfortable with allowing latent processes to take over and carry the "theory" for them, sometimes with little interest in rationalizing the process or perhaps even understanding it. Sometimes the knowledge of the theory and the resultant life change may come quickly. I remember a teacher from Denver who got a sudden insight and gut-level change one afternoon in a TORI community. This was about twenty years ago, and he still dates his radical change in teaching method and lifestyle to that moment of clarity. Others may struggle with the theory and the experience for years before it "takes".

Some seem to learn from introspection and self-examination.

Others do it or let it happen. For some, learning the theory is embodied in one or more specific behaviors that mean a great deal. A principal of a school in Baltimore said that the primary learning for him was expressed in moving out from behind his desk to talk with a visitor or visitors sitting around a small table in the center of his office. This, for him, seemed to make the difference. Others learn a generalized perceptual viewpoint that colors all looking but may not be represented in any specific "behavioral objective". For some, TORI theory may simply enrich another theory that they use as a kind of master plan that integrates living for them. For others, TORI theory may replace other theories, providing a total and fresh view of life. Some are looking for a prescription, an answer, a set of steps to follow, something that will tell them exactly what to do on the job tomorrow. Others feel hemmed in by prescriptions and wish to be free to face or solve each issue or problem as it happens, using the theory as a viewpoint toward ad hoc problem solving.

Whatever one's being and learning style, the road to understanding and using TORI theory is essentially a matter of trust level. In one sense it is simply a matter of learning to trust. When one's trust level changes in a significant way, then all else changes.

The trust level of the mindbody, at any given moment, determines how personal, open, allowing, and interdependent a person will be. It is these TORI discovering processes that determine the health, productivity, and effectiveness of the person in any given situation. Learning the theory and using it means educating the mindbody, increasing the trust level. I cannot make a change in my trust level by simply choosing to do so, by willing it, or by following a strictly rational process of mindbody control. But I can create experiences for myself that will make significant changes in my trust level.

1. The body. I'm continually amazed at how much my physical state can influence my attitudes, feelings, creativity, work level, and mental states. Sometimes I think that discovering jogging was the single most important discovery of my life. Sustained bodywork has made a critical difference in my appearance, my attitude toward my body, my self-esteem, my general productivity, and my level of trust. I went through a long period of having great difficulty in getting up enough energy to run. It was not until I discovered for myself how euphoric I would feel after running and what a permanent difference this made in me that I could fight through this lassitude barrier. The ancients seem to have known this well. There is a powerful message here that we are rediscovering. Reich taught us much about the body and its flows and its blockings, and the Neo-Reichians are educating us again to start with the body and its magic. Trust the body.

2. Sensing and perceiving. With the help of the growth centers and with the many-faceted revival of ancient wisdom’s, we are rediscovering our senses. We are learning to see and feel with new richness, new vision. Fear-bred dogmas have restricted our seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling. A new atmosphere in the church, the school, the theatre—the zeitgeist—encourages exploring the senses. Learning to trust one's own perceptions comes with continued experience in a hightrust environment. It is now commonplace for persons to report, after TORI and other growth experiences, new clarity, an amazingly powerful awareness of the simple sounds, sights, and smells of life—experiences that have been dulled in normal living. A new respect for the senses and their validity is changing modern life. One learns to trust one's senses by enriching one's experiences and trying out a life style that is based upon one's trust in one's sensory experience. I learn to trust what I see and touch.

3. The head. It is becoming fashionable in some quarters to get out of one's head, to distrust one's reason, and to trust one's heart and gut. It seems to me, rather, that I might well learn to trust my head, and not to denigrate it. What I can learn is that I can trust me—I can trust what I feel, think, sense, wish, and image. I can trust my processes. My cognitions can be integrative, unifying, whole, personal, fused with emotionality, and close to reality. Distrust of my head, my intellect, and my words is just as dysfunctional and dehumanizing as is distrust of my heart or gut. There can be just as much fakery in one's feelings as in one's thinking. Rediscovery of the head may be the theme of the new counter-revolution that follows our current era of the feelings and the senses. In popular conception, one's "theory" is in one's head. And this makes theory a dirty word—though six-lettered. For me, one's theory is in one's body, in one's being, in one's sensing, in one's thinking. I can thus have as much respect for my theory as I can have for me. Trusting one's reflections and thought processes is a significant part of one's learning the theory.

4. The heart and gut. "Gut learning" was the fashionable word for the acquisition of body wisdom in the early National Training Laboratories experiential T-groups. Various traditions have arrayed the mindbody elements very differently on a trustworthiness scale. Somehow to feel or touch Christ's wounds induced more trust than to hear His voice. The chakras have a clear order of priority, which is, in one sense, an order of trustworthiness. Trust your gut. Trust your heart. Trust your touch. Trust your hunches. The admonitions are legion. Having a "feel for it" is a significant test for and manifestation of my trust. Educating the feelings and emotions is a critical part of trust acquisition. This means becoming aware of feelings, experiencing their manifestations and effects, learning what they mean, and learning how to handle them.

5. The hand. Fear keeps us from the spontaneous, impulsive, and free life of doing and acting. We must trust ourselves in order to be comfortable when we act spontaneously. To let it all hang out is seen as very risky if we are afraid of what will hang out—and if we are afraid of reactions from others. In a high level of trust I am able to act impulsively and freely, to "let me happen", to let me be. I can let me be only if I trust me. There is no valid prescription. I learn to act impulsively by trying it out, testing my own reactions, determining my own tolerance for stress and ambiguity, discovering my level of freedom, and increasing this spontaneity as I determine that I can be safe. I can educate my bodymind to act spontaneously.

6. Expressive skills. "Skill" is sometimes seen as a nasty word. One who is skilled is one who is practiced, smooth, and, to some degree, has artifice. Skill practice is often an artificial process, especially "human relations" skills. Such skills are associated with manipulation and persuasion, with intention rather than with spontaneity. One can be skilled at giving strokes, for instance. One who "gives strokes" or offers to be "in a support group" is often distrusted more than one who simply says what he or she feels about the other person. I have found that many people become effective at human relations more readily from interaction in a "free field" in the unstructured milieu of a T-Group or a TORI community than they do from structured skill practice. The trouble with most practice is that one becomes "practiced". It is useful that every person learn to achieve valid communication of thoughts, feelings, impressions, and attitudes. If one is going to work in a helping profession, for instance, it seems important that one learns the words one can use in communicating "theory", in communicating feelings, in communicating all the aspects of one's being. One needs to learn "skills" in this positive sense: skills of problem solving, decision making, initiating action, listening, expressing wants, and other doings that are effective in group and community action.

7. Beyond the body. It is clear to me that through trust we can learn to transcend the senses, the body, the feelings, and all the other expressions of the mindbodyspirit. Self-education in out-of-the-body experiences, non-sensory awareness, altered states of consciousness, and the many transcendent states that bring new trust levels, is now possible, respectable, and even common. Educating myself for transcendence and cosmic states of trust is for me the most promising avenue to trust formation. Once I get the vision and perspective obtained by such experiences, then trust level is seen anew in relation to states that I did not know were possible. The perspective of the Environmental Quality scale makes possible new growth in everyday trust levels. I get an experiential base for new growth in everyday trust levels. I get an experiential base for new growth. I then know what it is to trust at wholly new levels, never before envisioned.

The theory states that the most-deeply organic and effective behavior for all persons is that which can be described as role-free, open and non-strategic, self-determining and proactive, and interdependent. Our fear-defense systems produce coping behavior inconsistent with this deeper, trusting self, that counters growth and is probably self-destructive. Educating my mindbody means that I can get enough in touch with myself so that these personal, open, want-determined, and interbeing behaviors come easily and naturally, come with little planning and thinking, come from my deepest inner self.

A person can create at least six kinds of experience that will lead to an understanding of the theory and the ability to apply it usefully in a wide range of personal and professional situations.

1. Living in the dynamics of a free-flow system. One advantage of the TORI community experience is that a member can experience, in depth, what happens in a free-flow, unstructured human system. It may take several experiences in a TORI community for these embedded dynamics to become visible to the eye of an observer caught in high-defense living and high-defense theory. This may be the person's first significant experience with Environmental Quality VI and VII. This is a critical change from the visible dynamics of EQ I-V climates. I am assuming that the direction of societal and evolutionary change is toward higher-EQ levels toward higher-trust living and free-structure dynamics. This directional change is happening at a more rapid pace than had been thought possible until quite recent developments in theory and practice.

Anyone who seriously wants to understand and use TORI theory will find it illuminating to experience the leaderless and low-structure community in depth. It is important to realize how closely tied in with EQ I-V dynamics are the current theories available to the behavioral scientist. This is especially true of behavior-modification theory, Transactional Analysis and other neo-Freudian theory, decision theory, reinforcement theory, OD theory and practice, assertiveness theory, role theory, and power theory. Not surprisingly, most available organizational and group theory grows out of experience with I-V environments. The research used to develop the theories is based upon assumptions and concepts that grow out of I-V experience and are limited by them. Trust-Level theory, however, can provide a useful bridge among these diverse concepts and research studies.

2. In-depth experience in developing a high-trust climate in a natural setting. TORI theory is a practical theory, developed in the practical world of experience and applicable to institutions as they are. TORI theory is one answer to the practitioner's question: What would my organization be like if it were more trusting? This, in effect, is the question that has been asked by many innovators in our culture who develop alternative schools, alternative churches, participative businesses, communal-living ventures, cooperative nurseries, rehabilitation centers, and a multitude of experimental attempts to build high-trust institutions in the midst of what is essentially a low-trust, EQ II-IV culture.

There is no theory available that will take the place of the hot experience under the diverse pressures present when a group tries to push the evolutionary process and get a bit ahead of the trends. The principles and guidelines discussed in this chapter will "work" in the traditional establishment, but there are no guarantees, no ways of preventing the pain of learning that comes from trying things out when the action is hot.

3. Professional-role experience in some profession or vocation where people deal with people. Not always, but nearly so, the best positions and jobs are given to those who have had conventional training for the position. There are many advantages to hiring an imaginative person with a good people theory who will take a fresh look at the task and perform it in a novel way. This is particularly true of a person using trust theory. Fortunately, there is an increasing number of imaginative people in positions of responsibility who are looking for unconventional people. Trust-Level theory is a powerful tool that can be used in any profession, business, industry, or organization that has a large people component—and used with a high degree of effectiveness because it enables the user to move ahead of the inevitable trend.

For most persons entering a people profession or organization, it is wise to have specialized traditional training and job experience— as a clinical psychologist, an occupational therapist, a school teacher, a manager, a psychiatrist, a group worker, an industrial psychologist, an administrator, or whatever. The person has then "met a payroll," knows the techniques and methods used by competent people in the field, has seen the problems and issues that face the field worker, knows the language of the trade, and knows the feel of the cards. The TORI innovator is not working on Mars, in some safe Utopia, or in a germ-free testing laboratory, but in the everyday defensive, pressure-laden, complex world of "reality". It is in this world that TORI theory is designed to be useful.

4. Experience at working out of a "leader role". I know of no satisfactory substitute for hot experience, especially a role-free, personal relationship in a high-trust milieu. Role-expectations and role-perceptions preoccupy both members and leaders when someone is appointed or elected to the leader box as manager, parent, teacher guru, facilitator, administrator, therapist, or governor. These expectations are especially difficult to handle when the power and authority are denied, softened, or covered by pretense. The intention of the TORI theorist is to work out of the role and join the group as a full member.

The barriers are many: fears, beliefs that it can't happen, demands that the leader "earn the money", dependencies, needs for a scapegoat, needs of the leader to feel special, and a vast and diverse list of other fear-related factors. Many have not seen a leader successfully work out of a role and believe that it is impossible to do so. But as an increasing number of people do see it happen and participate emotionally in the powerful sense of community that follows, it will be easier for leaders and groups to achieve this leaderless state. Working through the issue is a significant learning and probably necessary for the person trying to apply TORI theory in this transition culture.

5. Growing into transcendent and cosmic states and integrating these into one's way of being. Familiarity with TORI theory eases the transition into transcendent and cosmic states. The rapid development of knowledge and experience with dream control, ecstatic states, clairvoyance, drug-induced altered consciousness, meditation, faith healing, and a multitude of varied mystical and altered states, makes available to many people the possibility of transforming daily lives, raising of consciousness to new levels, and achievement of new trust levels in our society.

It is possible to create these experiences through the use of a wide variety of techniques and methods widely used in the growth movement. But emergent and self-generated experiences are more potent, whole, and life-changing. The experiences are occurring "naturally" and spontaneously in the TORI communities as people apply the theory more fully to their lives and make themselves available to new experiences as they happen. Through the understanding of such experiences, we can all make our normal lives more rich, more varied, more trusting, more ecstatic—and live more often in Environments VI-X.

6. Experience with theory, and especially with TORI theory. It is useful to have experience with theory, the constructs, theory-based institutions, people who live with and understand theory, the language, the unanswered questions, the research, the projections into the future, the alternatives, the misconceptions, the errors, the quacks and poseurs, the utopias, the hopes and the fears. I have a great confidence that articulated theory is useful, that it can guide social action and experimentation, that it can help integrate personal living, and that it can help us avoid the seemingly interminable repetition of error.

I certainly make no claim that TORI theory is the last word, but it is one viable alternative, one effort to apply a general theory to problems of practical living. It is one take-off place for a person to start building his or her own theory or to take another look at reconstructing the theory or theories that he or she uses. Come to think of it, it is true, of course, that everyone continually constructs a theory. Even the youngest child—especially the youngest child! Anyone who has read Piaget will never forget the importance of self-constructed theories in the child's attempts to understand the readily-available mysteries of everyday life.

TORI theory is, at once, more simple and more complex than it seems. Deliberately couched in everyday language, it may seem more simplistic than it is. TORI, like life, is very simple. Therein lies its profundity.

In Table X I have listed ten guidelines that may be useful to readers in getting a feel for the theory and its application. These guidelines may be used in several different ways:

1. As a kind of check list for the practitioner who is evaluating an organizational program. The user can look at the client system (church, classroom, sales department, or mental health clinic) from each of these ten viewpoints to build a diagnosis or a "treatment" program. Column Two in Table X lists the general correlates of trust level.
2. As a check list for a person who is examining his or her own growth. Column One lists ten symptoms of the growing, trusting person that change as trust level increases.
3. As a cue system for building cognitive clarity. There is no order to the list. Each statement of a guideline is another view of trust level, a restatement of the theory, another definition of trust level, another expressive symptom of organic health, a road map in looking at the effects of trust and fear, and a mini-theory of personal and organizational growth.
4. When stated in the form used in Table XI, each guideline is an alternate focus for social engineering and for system change.

In a sense, each guideline says it all. Each contains the others. The guidelines are in no sense a set of prescriptions. Each guideline defines a quest, a searching, a choice.

In each case I have tried to describe, first, how that guideline applies to the individual person, describing what I have seen happen in people who appear to be in states of high trust. I will make a general statement and then give examples of the direction that persons who are using the theory are taking. I will use the first person in each case in describing these people. Second, with each guideline, I will state how this guideline applies to a social system, first in general terms, and then with some specifics of what I have seen happen. Each person and each organization creates an individual and unique application of the principle.

1. Being in the flow and the rhythm.

In discovering and creating my own flow and rhythm, I am discovering myself anew in each moment. My own flow and organization is unique to me and is my process. I am always changing, flowing, being in process.

The enriched and trusting life is a flowing life. In our depths we respond with empathy and resonance to fluid forms—to dancing, skating, sailing, flying, swimming, floating, and the flowing and changing forms of life. The response of the Jonathan Livingston Seagull saga was due to something primal and to something latent that demands transcendence. And to me it is significant that the form is flowing and liquid.

Sucking, licking, breast-feeding, tasting, crying, urinating, sweating, breathing—all have an attraction quality, and especially so when one is free from inhibitions, defenses, prohibitions, taboos, and constraints—free from the discrete, boxed, metered, scaled, moralized, hard-edged, defended, evaluated, constipated, hardened, encapsulated, blocked, and solid forms of constrained life. The full life is more like a river than a concrete road. More like a cloud than a computer.

A woman who creates beautiful, flowing pieces of art on a pottery wheel once told me with zest what it was like to get "into the wheel, the clay, and the flow" of the process. When she got centered and flowing, the clay seemed to form itself, to feel right, to grow into a form of liquid grace. So it is with a person who discovers her own rhythms, patterns, diurnal flow, and life dance. All this is a matter of trust. If I don't have a high degree of trust I don't even see the flow in the wheel and the clay, or discover my rhythm.

It is important for the parent, the teacher, or the nurse to see the flow. This is partly a matter of perspective. Once, looking out of the window of a landing airplane, I saw thousands of people moving out of a huge stadium. With growing fascination, I watched the flow of the people, disembodied, abstract, undifferentiated. I was unaware of the persons as individuals. What I saw seemed rather like a river, with waves, pools, and stoppages. Just as understanding Einstein's concept of time and space is a perspective process, so is seeing anything. Looked at through "other eyes", the chair would become a flowing, whirling storm of atoms and would lose its chair-like form.

My experience with persons and with organizational forms is that it is useful, and more valid for our purposes, to see people processes in their liquid forms. For some purposes of collective prediction— perhaps in predicting traffic patterns, materials processing, mental illness, or school absences—it may be useful to rubricize, scale, and count persons and their attributes. It is not useful for administrators, therapists, teachers, and others who work directly with people to be seduced into these objective, classificatory, tin-flow attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. One can choose to see the flow.

The TORI discovering processes flow. There is a being, opening, flowering, and interbeing. The defending behaviors don't flow. They block the flow and are hard, bristly, and congesting.

Each social system is unique, has its own being. It has its own flow and rhythm. Together, in interdependence and mutuality, we discover our common form—our organization—which is more than the sum of its discrete parts. Being in this flow and this unique form is infinitely exciting.

Applying this general principle to the management of organizations, nations, and other social systems is a matter of stance, attitude, perspective, vision, and way of being. My insights about flow-centered management have come from consulting with and experiencing a few persons of vision in management—particularly in Champion Paper, Weyerhaeuser, Dow, General Motors, and the Bell System. These few are managers and executives who see things writ large, who see the organization as a living organism, and who see it with excitement and courage. They see the flow in the paper mill, in the manufacturing process, in the mobilization of resources toward movement in streams that they clearly envision.

The most effective executives perceive this clearly. They see beyond the units, the parts, the discrete elements, and experience the process as flow. They see the river. Having this perspective, they trust these processes and avoid getting lost in irrelevancies of problems that are not critical to the central flow.

It is not as easy for many of these same executives to see people processes as flowing, especially the intra-personal flow. Some depersonalize the individuals, seeing them only as parts of the larger flow. What is necessary for full growth of the executive is to put it all together, seeing the internal people processes, and the persons themselves as human and central aspects of the flow.

In the TORI communities we have discovered that a flowing physical environment enhances the rhythmic interaction of the persons in the community. Cushions, soft carpets, curved walls, no hard furniture—all provide an environment that enhances the flow. As the people soften and become gentle when defenses are reduced, they cuddle, touch, sometimes pile up like kittens or puppies; they dance, run, play, and flow into patterns that are soft, un-edged, liquid, and very different from the rows and linear forms of the conventional school or factory.

Management that is aware of the principle of flow tries to bring it into the organization by rearranging office and building space so that space flows with functional needs for communication, materials distribution, and other interdependencies; increasing visibility of the total operation so that all employees can see the total flow in perspective, allowing employees to discover their own work and rest rhythms rather than prescribing times for coffee breaks, and arrival and departure from work; creating a flex-time concept that is applied to many aspects of scheduling; encouraging subgroups and teams to discover their own identity and flow and rhythms; removing linear and rectangular barriers to flow that are found in regulations as well as in architecture; experimenting with moveable partitions, files, desks, and chairs; eliminating role prescriptions and job specifications that box people into hierarchical and rectangular relationships; removing norms that prevent flow; encouraging the flow of talk out of channels; encouraging people to play music and to move on impulse and to flow—anything to increase the flow and liquidity of relationships in the organization.

Productivity, creativity, and effectiveness of the organization are all enhanced when the forms of organizing come out of the emerging flows and rhythms that are natural to the organization.

As a trusting person, I trust my life processes. They contain the fullness of life. I am in them and they are in me. I am who I am. I let me happen. I let life happen.

When I let myself be who I am, give myself freedom to flow and happen, allow my juices to flow, I am trusting myself and my processes. When I am trusting my processes, I allow myself to play, to move into new adventures, to accept new challenges, to take risks, to go with my flow, and to keep moving ahead when I feel fear. It is precisely when there is ambiguity, uncertainty, unpredictability, when there are no guarantees, no plans, no structured techniques, that I rely upon my trusting—that I allow myself to trust my processes and go with what is happening.

My processes include my fears, uncertainties, feelings, fantasies, phobias, hunches, impulses, paranoia, flights of imagination, terror, and all of the events that go on in me. Trusting my processes means to let me be in these processes without trying to control them, direct them, or constrain them. Trusting that my free-flying way, my natural impulses, my way of being will take care of me, will pull me through, will guide me, will turn out all right.

The more one distrusts one's own processes, the more one requires a technique, a leader, a guide, a cookbook, a structure, a plan, a timetable, a reservation at the hotel, a life insurance policy, a no-cut contract, a no-risk agreement, a money-back guarantee, a buffer zone, a warning, a warm-up period, a non-title fight, a trial run, a road map, a friend in court—any hedge against the normal risks of living. The more one trusts one's own processes {competencies, perceptions, intuitions, feelings, ideas, or projections, the more one is willing to risk, to "come to play", to go all out, to seek adventure, to move toward ambiguity, to invent a new solution, to explore new worlds, to make new friends, to take on new responsibility, to accept a challenge, to take a new job, to hire an unusual employee, to develop a new product line, to pick up a hitch-hiker, or to go on a blind date. Shooting the moon—as a poker gambit or as a space adventure—is not for those who don't trust their processes.

So it is with organizations, groups, and all social systems. A system that trusts its own processes trusts the flow of life and lets it happen. Life, when trusted, will form itself. Organizations and nations grow and create their own preferred forms. Life, when free, transcends.

When organizational processes are distrusted and feared, life in the organization is over-planned, over-organized, over-managed, over-supervised, over-manipulated, and over-strategized. The feel of the organization is one of constriction and congestion. The distrusting can be expressed in the formal structure of rules and contracts, or it can be expressed in the informal messages conveyed by the behavior of people. It is not possible to fool the troops for long. At some level the feigners are sensed as unreal. Genuine trust is sensed, known.

The processes that are the organization are the message. If the processes are sound—self-determining, person-honoring, transparent, interdependent, synergistic—then the products will be sound. In the long run, of course, the processes are far more important than the products. Management, especially in a fear/emergency/fire-fighting atmosphere, has a difficult time seeing this. Fearful management is results-oriented, product-centered, and bottom-line motivated. It is the process that counts, not the product—in sex, in play, in therapy, in friendship, in marriage, in communication, and in manufacturing.

Management’s that have trusted processes have experimented with sending out blank, signed checks with orders, as Kaiser did; removed sign-in sheets and time clocks; abolished quality-control check ups; tried supervisor-less work groups; decentralized operations; tried one or two-level management; removed all kinds of dehumanizing rules and regulations; abolished performance appraisals; done away with grades and merit pay; removed guns from policemen's hands; removed prohibition laws and drug regulations; humanized mental hospitals and prisons; removed job specifications; reduced training and communications programs; released staff and management from unnecessary functions—all manner of ways of allowing human processes to perform their magic.

The functions of goal-setting and planning are less clear. Most organizational functions are over planned, and most goals are over specified and over formalized. The amount of planning and goal-setting probably is a function of complexity, of group size, of amount of interdependence with correlative organizational units, and certainly of fear. My overall impression in consulting with a wide range of organizations is that too much time is spent on planning and goal-setting.

The distrusting processes (manipulating, controlling, covering, depersonalizing) are self-defeating and self-perpetuating. People who resort to control and manipulations inevitably discover that controls and manipulations become necessary. Controls and manipulations are time-consuming and costly, and they seldom work as well as had been hoped. When they don't work (the death penalty, penalties for tardiness, fines for errors, of safety rules) the tendency is to assume that the controls need to be tightened and shored up. It is very difficult and seemingly irrational to reduce the controls and supervision when the procedures don't work. It is difficult to get free of the assumption that the rules and controls are necessary.

I create my own unique being, my own reality, my own life mission, my own vision of what I can be. I am what I see myself to be.

I am. I am worthy of infinite trust. I write my own life theory. My vision is as broad as I wish it to be.

Personal growth is partly a matter of cognitive and perceptual clarity. At all biological levels, fear constricts perceptual clarity and range.

Trust opens up thinking and seeing.

The executives who are able to see the flow because they can stand back and view it from perspective are able to do so because they have some degree of trust derived from experience. Their trust enables them to have (a) courage, and (b) vision—the two significant elements in a trust-centered way of being. The courage to look. And the trust to take the big, long look.

Because what I am determines so much what I see, and because the seeing process is so important in my personal growth, I must learn to understand the perceptual processes and how I can enrich them. As was often illustrated in the previous chapter, my theory is integrally related to how I see my experience. Trust theory is particularly significant in this regard. Higher trust enables me to transcend my fear and look beyond what is immediately apparent.

Trust theory implies that hostile, aggressive behavior comes from defense against perceived or anticipated attack. If I can really see the hostile person as self-defending, then it is easier to react non-defensively. If I have the theory in my gut, then my reaction, even my impulsive one, is likely to be less full of anger and hurt if I see the hostility as defense. If I see a child's stealing as a defensive coping reaction to my punishment, I am likely to feel and react differently than if I see the stealing as a character defect or an unprovoked attack. When my theory grows out of my deepest experience and is integral to me, when it is congruent with my reasonings and understandings, then it provides a guide to my looking and thinking.

Developing my ability to perceive is a critical and fundamental process. What I see and how I see persons and events determines how I feel about them and how I will react to them. The perceiving triggers it off. I am impressed, for instance, how people who trust deeply, who understand what trusting really is and who have a resultant, inner tranquillity, are able to see through the presenting defense layers and see the frightened, love-seeking inner self that resides deeply in all of us. I have seen this process so frequently that I am convinced that the inner core of each person is gentle and love-seeking—and not demonic or death seeking, as many would have us believe. In any event, the person who sees (actually senses and perceives) the love-seeker within reacts in ways that are less escalating and defensive than someone does who habitually sees only the ostensibly hostile behavior.

The great power of trust-inductive experiences is that this basic trust changes the sensing and perceiving processes. Trust theory provides a pathway for the integration of life processes at a very deep level. The person is actually creating himself or herself in the process of growth and creating, in part through the perceptual processes, the environment in which the growth occurs.

Each organization and social system creates and discovers its own mission—its vision of the present and of the future. This vision serves as a unifying and synergizing force. Just as in a significant sense each person does what he or she wants, so is it true that each organization accomplishes its mission. Its mission is its deep-lying, conscious/unconscious, inner flow and direction—the gestalted being, the synergy of all the individual wants, fantasies, themes, and needs.

People gather together in organizations for a great variety of reasons and wants, and in the process of interacting create a great many more. They come together—in churches, businesses, clubs, professional organizations—to relieve loneliness, to find friends, to please others, to do what is expected, to build egos, to punish, to fight, to find scapegoats, to get power, to find love, to get excitement, to relieve boredom, to escape spouses and families, to change the world, to teach, to learn, to work, to do and feel all manner of things.

Somehow in amalgamating these individual and diverse wants and needs, the organization creates and discovers a mission that transcends the persons involved. The organization can become, for example, a group of evangelical zealots ruthless in making converts; a worldwide crusade for mercy and aid to the poor; a patriotic movement for murdering millions of Jewish people; a loving environment for discovering a new way of being; a work-oriented, middle-class, conservative, devoted-to-work business venture; a cruel vendetta devoted to punishing deviates and non-conformists; a professional organization devoted to preserving the good life for the selected few; or whatever the organization may become as it tries to discover itself and finds itself escalating the latent wants of the members into something that becomes a centering mission, a transcending quasi-conscious goal that everyone gets caught up in.

Organizations become what, in some part, they set out to become: the Civil Liberties Union, the Ku Klux Klan, the CIA, the Republican Party, the American Legion, Dow Chemical, the Mormons, the Quakers, or the Daughters of the American Revolution. In part they have acted out their stereotypes; in part they are reactive, responding to critics who have pushed them in ways not intended; in part they are rational, goal-setting, conscious-agenda groups; and in part they have become what they unconsciously wanted to become.

Management that has been aware of the principle of creating vision and mission has tried a variety of approaches: deep sensing sessions; career development programs centered around the central mission of the organization; hiring external consultants do in-depth interviewing of key and/or sampled persons in the organization and using these data as a base for a system-wide conference on mission-setting; company-wide theory-based seminars or experiential-training sessions built around the concept of trust and perception; semantic-differential testing programs sampling company attitudes around selected issues that are crucial to the organizational mission; a wide variety of training and "organizational development" sessions arranged to create visibility of perceptual data; ingenious ways of creating ease of entry of all employees to the offices and attention of key executives and key planning and goal-setting people; and many other types of training and communications programs.

Nevertheless, I feel that we have made very little headway in this area. We have yet to discover ways of creating mission and of involving members of large organizations so that they have a part in creating overall goals or in changing them. Feelings of isolation and impotence are common, even among those who seem to be in positions of power. In sensitivity training sessions which I have given for corporation presidents and chief executive officers, I have heard presidents of huge corporations comment on how impotent they felt in not being able to exert influence upon their own organizations!

I nourish and care for me, for I am a worthy recipient of my love, an expression of the divine essence. Self-caring is a redemptive and spiritual process. Genuine love is freeing and celebrative, warming and gentling. Cared for, I am able to care for and love others and to join them in community and interdependence.

It is ironic that most of us could adequately administer to our own love need but relinquish this function to others who do it less well— therapists, parents, ministers, or friends. It is a sad commentary on the adequacy of our self-caring. We have failed to learn how to love ourselves.

Loving, in itself, is a nourishing process, deeply needed by all. Loving, of self and of others, is life-giving. It is the distortions of love that deprive it of its nourishing quality.

Looked at from our Trust-Level analysis, loving/caring looks something like this

1. Loving and caring is being who I am and being there for you as a "real" person. I can't love a role, only a person. When I have presence, I am putting my energy into being, not into defending.

Caring is not being in role, defending, or taking on the role of friend, helper, therapist, or parent. When one takes on the stance of the altruist, one's caring is diluted, screened, and not really available to one's self or to another.

2. Loving and caring is communicating in depth. Love is an expression. Love unexpressed and unfelt is not love. Love is communication, a two-way process. I show where I'm at, show my warmth and joy and anger. Loving is also learning to "read" the signs from another, a searching, a taking in, a listening to your quiet. Love is impulsive, spontaneous, natural, unpretentious, without guile. Caring is not manipulative, strategic, covert, rationed out for a purpose, careful, diluted, handed out on schedule. Love can be trusted.
3. Loving and caring is allowing others to be who they are. It is self rewarding and does not need approval, sanction, external reward, or repayment. Love, like grace, is free: It doesn't have to be earned, deserved, or warranted. Loving caresses both the lover and the loved.

Loving is not bartering, does not demand or require repayment and reciprocation. It is not helping, protecting, parenting, or taking care of. It is not given out of loyalty, duty, or obligation. It is given and received freely.

4. Caring is being with. Everyone falls in love with everyone who is in an undefended state, when all parties feel no need to defend. Loving and trusting are the same processes.

Loving is not owning, controlling, possessing, sacrificing, depending, or sucking your strength. It is sharing, allowing, and letting be.

Self-caring, then, is a process of treating myself as I would treat a lover. It is being in me in depth. It is communicating with me, without pretense. It is letting me be who I am, without parenting, approving, punishing, or correcting myself. It is living with me, without defense.

None of this happens in a vacuum. I cannot, by myself, learn to love myself. Learning to care for self comes about in a caring environment that I help create. People learn to love in community. It is this strong belief that led Lorraine and me to put so much energy and high priority on developing community in our early efforts to apply TORI theory to all aspects of personal and organizational living.

An effective organization, group, or social system is a loving and caring place. When this is so, we can learn to love the organizations we create. We love our organization as something we have created together, giving it our best efforts, our care and love. It is the highest expression of our being together that we are able to create at the moment, at the time. It is an expression of us.

Because we have learned distrust as a way of life, we have come to disown our organizations, to blame others for what we have created, to see our organizations, our neighborhood, and our nation as created by people "up there", those with power and influence, those with "motives", probably ulterior.

An extremely encouraging sign of the times is a growing tendency to take responsibility for our social systems. We are creating alternative schools, churches, and businesses; we take responsibility for them and keep them small and personal and manageable. We march on Washington, protest war, create consumer cooperatives, organize to fight for women's rights, create a multitude of "self help" organizations, and do all manner of things that mean, for one thing, that we are trying to "own" our organizations.

Groups and organizations can be loving places. In Chapters 7, 8, and 9, I will discuss some successful efforts in this direction and some principles that we have used in bringing this about.

There are many ways of applying this self-care principle to our professional and organizational lives. If, for instance, I am the teacher in a classroom, my first consideration is: How can I make this an environment that turns me on, that I look forward to, in which I find daily love, and where I am doing what I want to do? When I can do this for myself, the environment cannot help but be a good one for the students. There will be learning, growth, and community.

We are all familiar with classrooms in which this is not the case. If I get tired easily, dread coming to class on Monday, look forward to quitting time and the end of the week, and find that the class has responded poorly, I am not taking care of myself in the classroom. So it is with therapists in the therapy hour, parents in the home, managers in the department, or any professional. Well cared for by self, the therapist, teacher, parent, or manager is good to be around, learns to love students, children, or workers, and is likely to be highly effective.

Several organizations for whom I am a consultant are making good progress in reducing the barriers to attainment of the caring community: the assumption that the caring environment is impossible to attain; the assumption that loving/caring is unrelated to productivity and goal attainment; lack of experience with loving communities and caring work environments; unresolved fears of organizations and the "establishment", especially of large organizations; the assumption that unless properly supervised, people will organize themselves as the boys did in Lord of the Flies; scarcity of leaders, consultants, and theorists, even in education and in the churches, who believe in the attainability or relevance of the loving community; and a host of other fears and negative attitudes and assumptions that pervade modern life.

I show me to you, inviting us both to come out and join the world. I take you into me and make myself available to go into you and your space. We create the overlapping circles that are transparent, translucent, and boundary-less.

Opening of the person is both putting out and letting in. It is an opening of auras and orifices, the flowing of juices, giving out of clear messages and welcoming of incoming messages.

Open messages are most effective when they are clear and unmixed, when they are spontaneous, and when they bubble up in the interaction. They come through best when they come early, before over planning and over mobilization of fear, caution, and polishing up. They are heard best when they are not translated into control and punishment.

"Leave me alone, you bastard!" is a message that contains a great deal of feeling. It shows a lot about the speaker, but it actually camouflages the basic feelings. Control, hostility, and interpretation dominate the message. It is the translated aspects of the message that create the distortion, the defense, the counter-aggression, and other negative effects of mix-communication. Messages are most effective when they are open, when they describe me, my feelings, and my perceptions; not when they attempt to describe you, or when they are my interpretations and analyses of you. "I am beginning to feel like a child" has a far different flavor and stimulates a different reaction than "You are acting like a parent!"

The concept of openness is controversial; people react to it with feeling and fear. It strikes closer to where most of us live than any of the other three TORI discovering processes. Data on the TORI Self Diagnosis Scale consistently show lower scores [less openness) on the openness scale than on any of the other three TORI measures. When I talk about the theory in detail to a new audience I consistently get more questions on openness—and more resistance, misunderstanding, and defensive projection—than on any of the other three major constructs. The interaction may be due both to my fear of openness and to the fears of others. The resistance that most of us show is in part due to our deep organic recognition of the significance of the concept, our fear of being opened up, and our easily-aroused guilt about covering up aspects of ourselves that we really know "should be" opened up.

At a rational level, the advantages to the person and to the system of opening up are numerous and fairly obvious:

1. Closed behavior is associated with bodily ailments, tension, and anxiety. The internal growing and healing processes are blocked. Open and non-defensive behavior has been found to reduce headaches, indigestion, blood pressure, and a variety of psychosomatic symptoms.
2. Open expression serves as a catharsis which frees good feelings. It is as if I "give my guilt away", rid myself of bad feelings, hostility, hates, and sickness-inducing thoughts.
3. Holding back is usually sensed as a negative message, for it is often negative feelings that I hold back. Openness, if clear and focused on my feelings rather than on your behavior, is often perceived as a positive and friendly message, even when the revealed feelings are negative.
4. Opening releases energy previously consumed in the neurotic effort to cover up which can then be used in more functional activities.
5. Showing and telling an inadequacy changes the behavior or feeling that I experience as an inadequacy. Showing and revealing are first steps in new growth.
6. If I am open in expression, without artifice or attempt to cover up, I don't have to remember what I told people before, and I don't get caught in the "tangled webs" that are spun by conscious or unconscious deceiving.
7. The open person is safe and has no basic need to defend. There is a sense of serenity and security about being honest and clear in one's communications. Defense starts with covering up.
8. Openness invites positive feelings, trust, and intimacy from others. Openness reduces the distance.
9. Openness breeds openness. People who are open are reciprocated with sharing and learning experiences that guide them to effective social interaction.
10. Openness is associated with and necessary to effective assertiveness and proactivity, two highly-prized behavioral values.
11. Because my feelings and negative sides are generally already known through communication processes that are surprisingly accurate, although often unconscious, my acknowledging "negative sides" by revealing them early and spontaneously builds trust and confidence.
12. Rumors and projections escalate the distortions. Early openness cuts down the rumor-escalation process and improves the data processing in the whole system.
13. The decisions in the system are of higher quality because they come out of more valid data processing in the system. Decisions that represent the genuine opinions and attitudes of people who are to carry out the decisions are apt to result in effective action.
14. Openness is one of the four most critical ingredients in the high quality environment, discussed in Chapter 3.

Effective marriages, therapeutic pairs, companies, and social systems of all kinds create open space, open communication, open forms, and open organization. Masking and filtering are for defense and protection of the fearful, not for productive living.

There are many ways of opening up the social system: open stock shelves; open space in classrooms, offices, and factories; open agendas for staff meetings; unclosed office doors; public salary schedules and correspondence files; large, open data-collection meetings; public sharing of results from questionnaires and assessment tests; open and free clothing; open elections; public and open expression of criticism and evaluation; and many ways that "free the system"

When I focus my energy in doing what I deeply want, all internal states are possible for me. When I create a clear image, energy is mobilized in amazing ways to help me actualize the image.

I have become very much aware in recent years of how I set my own limitations, and how easily I can remove them. I produce my own energy. I tap inner resources when I get in touch with what I really want to do. This way, the distinctions between work and play disappear, energy is focused on what matters, actions are rewarding in and of themselves. I am into my own flow and the flow of the system, and I thus create my own life.

What is impressive in the spate of new books and articles on power, intimidation, strategy, and manipulation in management and social change is the waste of energy involved. The displacement and dissipation of energy into tangential, devious, indirect, elaborate techniques of strategy and management are impressive only because they are so wasteful. A more organic and centered way of organizational life would mean more direct, simple, natural, focused ways of doing.

People have a wide range of intrinsic motivations, and they enjoy doing many things: not only eating, breathing, having sex, and getting sensory gratification, but also working, creating, solving problems, building factories, writing books, creating symphonies, curing the sick, and producing goods. People who get in touch with what they enjoy doing, what they want to do, are able to find a wide variety of activities that are self-rewarding, that are pleasant in and of themselves. And often, people who are really free and tuned in to themselves are able to find activities that are magnificently exciting, perhaps ecstatic. I occasionally see an artist, an engineer, a scientist, or a carpenter who would choose to do what he or she is doing regardless of pressures to do something else. Sometimes they prefer these activities to "vacations", spending time with their families, or taking more upward-mobile positions.

Life can be very satisfying when people have discovered activities that are exciting and are doing them at a pace they choose, with people they enjoy, and under conditions that suit them. These are rarely, if ever, people whose motivations have been managed by others. When parents, teachers, managers, or ministers try to shake or change motivations of others, they usually set up some kind of formal or informal program of pay, merit badges, pats on the head, gold stars, or any other of a wide variety of rewards and punishments. These efforts to influence the behavior or character of others are often extrinsic to the processes themselves and arbitrarily administered. So-called "behavior modification" programs are simply a sophisticated formalization of the process that most parents and managers hit on by happenstance.

Negative effects follow these extrinsic-reward (or punishment] processes. People learn to work for pay or approval rather than for the joy of doing. Rewards and punishments must be continually increased or renovated in order to maintain effectiveness. Responsibility for goal-forming, standard-setting, evaluation, and other aspects of life activities, that are best when self-determined, is taken by someone external to the activity. Huge amounts of useless energy are spent on these reward-related strategies that could better be spent by managers and parents on something that is more useful or enjoyable. Because the rewards seem to work, as they obviously do for a time, the myths arise that they are necessary; and organizations build on the false premise that extrinsic rewards are effective management tools. Most unholy is the fact that ninety per cent of the beautiful and potentially-edifying activities that people engage in are put in an onerous box called "work", a category filled with unpalatable and needing-to-be-rewarded doings that somehow aren't worth doing in their own right.

Tuning in to one's sources of energy and focusing the energy on what matters is central to one's growth. Otherwise, an energy drain diverts us from our essential being. Energy is drawn away from the discovering processes and into defending against the enemy without, when the real enemy is within. We put our energy into excellence and perfectionism, when there are really very few things that are "worth doing well". We trap ourselves into seeking irrelevant rewards— rewards for doing things that are not really what we want to do with out lives. We drain energy into all of the processes of manipulating, seeking power, persuading, leading, influencing, dominating—all diversions from the things we would do if we really got in touch with what we wanted to do, deep within us. We pour our energy into meeting the expectations of others.

Similarly, the effective organization avoids diversions and focuses energy on its central mission, on its examined wants, on its essence. Effective organizations don't drain energy into defensive maneuvers, ritualistic and inherited doings, and unexamined goals.

There are ways for inventive management to create streamlined and simple organizations that focus energy on what really matters. Such procedures as job-posting and functional and lateral mobility make it easy for people to move around and experiment with jobs and functions until they find something that turns them on and tunes them in to their deep sources of inner energy. Environmental design in this instance would mean creating an environment in which it is relatively easy for people to discover what they really enjoy doing by experimenting with new activities. Vocational counseling, interest testing, and performance testing are all useful in determining one's wants, but there is no substitute for trying things out. All effective organizations provide for ease of trying and moving into new activities. They recognize that discovering and creating one's wants, interests, and aptitudes are lifelong processes. Wants are often hidden from us until we try things. Wants continually change.

A refreshing discovery has recently been made: people can learn and do exceptionally well in several different professions and vocations. Persons and organizations change constantly in this discovering process. The resulting job mobility can be viewed by the organization as a costly and disruptive process. It is now coming to be seen as a source of new energy and creativity. John K. Wood, for instance, in The Joy of Being Fired, tells of his dramatic findings in connection with the mass firings of the space scientists a few years ago that followed a change in the government's space policy. He found that the firings forced many of the scientists to admit the fact that they were bored and burned out in their jobs. They discovered that they welcomed this drastic "opportunity" to seek new jobs and create new careers. Organizations do a notably poor job of creating environments in which persons can continue this creative search for renewal and for matching life activities with the inner springs of energy.

Wood, along with many other people, helped create a precedent for people to create jobs rather than hunt for ones that existed. The most creative job consultants now help applicants to visualize the ideal image of the position that would be most suited to their interests and energies, and then to hunt companies or organizations that wish to provide an environment for just such a professional position.

Effective organizations are learning to put energy more effectively into their central mission: manufacturing, making products, giving service, improving product design, and creative problem-solving. And they are learning to reduce the amount of energy put into energy-draining, dysfunctional, and often counter-productive activities such as supervision, quality control, public relations, inspection systems, overly elaborate record keeping, unnecessary training and management development programs, extrinsic-reward systems, punishment systems, security programs, and a host of other defense-related activities.

I create the fears and forces which constrain me. What I can create, I can un-create. Fears and constraints are, in a certain very real sense, illusions. They are produced by my defensive perceptions of my world. Facing these realities can set off growth-producing processes in me. I can remove the constraints that bind me.

As a consultant I have sometimes asked members of organizations to look at what is constraining them. They will first come up with such things as tight controls, inadequate resources, lack of power and influence, unfair competition, lack of competent help, inefficient organization, labor unions, governmental regulations, restrictive corporate or central policy, public opinion, inadequate education or training, and a host of other factors which they see in the situation. As people discuss and examine the question, they tend to move from this kind of list to the realization that the constraints, rather than being part of the situation, exist only in their own perceptions, assumptions, attitudes, and feelings about the situation. Applying TORI theory, I have learned that these internal forces are in fact determined by one's own fears and distrusts.

Kurt Lewin found it useful to conceive of each given situation as a product of an equilibrium between two sets of forces: inducing forces and constraining forces. He recognized the valid principle that it was more effective to use energy to reduce the resisting forces than to work at increasing the inducing forces. In my experience it is clear that the initial steps are these: the recognition that the constraints are internal to me, that I have complete control over them, that they are fear-defense processes, and that the constraints are minute in comparison to the internal powers and resources that I can bring to bear upon the situation.

The environmental-quality discussion in Chapter 3 is relevant here. Each movement up the EQ scale is into a less constrained, more releasing environment.

Most of society's conservative and civilizing forces exist as sets of morals, guidelines, taboos, rules, conventions, prohibitions, and cautions deriving from our fears of dangers in the world of nature, and our fears of the inner nature of the person. It has been thought, "with good reason" in the experiences of history, that people are dangerous and that they need to be protected from their own inner, impulsive nature. They therefore need ethical systems, legal codes, contracts and balances to keep their raw inner natures in control. Our fears collude with these external forces and accept pressures from outside, even augmenting them. But as trust develops and as our understanding of the many translations of fear grows, we are able to move through and beyond fear and reduce the constraints that bar our way.

So, too, the effective organization focuses energy on the reduction or removal of constraining forces upon its members. This is a basic management principle. Its full use obviously requires trust on the part of management and a high trust level present in the organization.

Many managers, parents, and teachers reinforce an inherited constraint-induction theory with their own fears and spend considerable energy in a deliberate and rational effort to increase the reasonable and appropriate constraints upon organizational members. I recall seeing a huge sign at a YMCA swimming pool. It had a huge "NO", about four feet high, and next to this what they were saying "NO" to: running, throwing things, jumping in the water, spitting, pushing, horsing around, and jumping. I asked the director if the sign had any effect upon the kids. He said: "No, but you have to do something to try to control them!" He reinforced my observations about constraint management: (1) constraints seldom work, (2) they often set up resistances that increase the problems they are designed to solve, (3) they are used by management out of defense and desperation, and (4) they are used a great deal by management, especially in volunteer agencies, educational systems, and churches—just the places where they would work least well, and where this form of management is so very dissonant with the usual underlying philosophy of such institutions. The effect of punishment as a constraint are usually more damaging than the behavior that the punishment is trying to "correct" or restrain.

Because so much of traditional management theory and practice is constraint-inductive, it requires a quiet revolution in the organization to put into practice a constraint-reductive program. The central issue is one of trust level. When trust level changes, management practices change.

I create the world around me, my environment, the reality I live in. I always have a choice.

This primary principle and guideline is discussed in Chapter 3. Table VIII summarizes the environmental-design point of view as contrasted with that of the more traditional interventive-management style.

The effective organization creates itself as an interdependent way of life. It creates mutuality, not competitiveness; friends, not enemies. The organization creates its own neighbors as it interfaces with other organizations. As the physical and sociological environment becomes significant as a world factor, modern management has become increasingly aware of the massive effects of the cultural environment as well as of the environment internal to the organization itself. Just as the individual creates his or her own world, the organization itself can create its own internal and external environment. The principle of environmental design indicates that effective managers focus upon shared efforts to change the environment rather than upon efforts to change individuals.

In TORI theory, environmental design centers upon four variables:

1. Personalizing. Providing unique psychological and physical "space" for each person. Removing role structuring in the offices, the parking lots, and the dining room. Reducing the emphasis upon tables of organization and role prescriptions. Abolishing the practice of channeling communications. Reducing categories and treating people like persons, which is what women's liberation, and racial and ethnic tensions are all about. Removing the norm that status people have titles and non-status people have none.
2. Opening. Discussed in Guideline Number Five.
3. Realizing. Increasing self-determination. Increasing the visibility of multiple options in all phases of the organization. Team-building and goal-setting, integrated into self-selection of tasks and sub-goals. Use of socio-metric and pairing choices in team composition and management assignment. Use of depth psychology in goal-determination and want-creation.
4. Interdepending. Creating norms of teaming and cooperation. Community-building as discussed in the following section. Experimentation with matrix, grid, and other functional forms of team-formation and organization-building. Open space that allows people to see each other, interact, and discover and create interdependencies. Design of information retrieval systems that optimize interfaces among units of the organization.

With you, I co-author our shared experiences. None of us exists by and to ourselves. You are my sister. You are my brother. The discovery of each other in depth in community is a renewal process that will vitalize any organization.

I create my own community. Joining, sharing, and living in mutuality are made possible by the development of the three prior TORI discovering processes: trusting-being, opening-showing, and realizing flowering. When I know who I am, can show me to you, and am doing what I deeply want, then I can join you in depth and shared creativity.

Moving on the EQ scale is a movement forward on the scale of community depth and strength. As we get in touch with newer dimensions of our capacity for being, of integrating more aspects of our being into out functional lives, then we are ready for higher forms of community.

For me, personally, the fourth discovering process, the interdepending-withing, offers the highest form of potential satisfaction, the process that is made possible by the development in the other three processes. My greatest development has come in the TORI community experiences: my highest appreciation of my self and my own capacities; my out-of-the-body experiences; my deepest awarenesses of trusting; my deepest religious and spiritual moments; and my own movement into cosmic states.

Any social system can become a community. Seeing itself as a community, the organization can move into whatever environmental-quality level it can visualize. We are on the brink of new discoveries about community in organization. Fresh developments in the field of group dynamics from 1947 to 1977 caused a revolution in management theory and practice. They precipitated the new discipline of "organizational development" and led to significant changes in social systems. The new developments in community-forming, pioneered by the TORI community experiences and related to other parallel developments in several disciplines, will have an even more significant impact on organizational theory and practice and on social conditions in the next thirty years.

Chapter 9 discusses some of the developments in community building that grow out of Trust-Level theory. Our assumptions about the potential of community are as limiting as our assumptions were forty years ago about the "human potential" of persons, before so much was discovered in the Maslow-instigated revolution in the realm of personal growth.

10. Sensing the cosmic all-in-all.

It is difficult for me to communicate in words the effects of my cosmic and all-in-allness experiences and the effects of presumably similar experiences of others. The most awesome effects for me, and for people whom I have experienced personally, include the following:

1. An inner sense of tranquility, a quieting of the inner turmoil, a realization, at the deepest times, that all need to defend has passed— that there are no enemies. No fears.
2. A larger perspective on everything. Seen in relation to the allness, all tragedy and pain, indeed any feeling, is powerful in itself, all powerful, but also minuscule in relation to the infinity of life that is mine. Following my cosmic experiences, I recall looking anew at previous experiences, each of which at the time had seemed unmanageable and traumatically overwhelming—the death of my son, my divorce, my illegitimacy in a sheltered Mormon community, my sudden awareness of irreversible aging, my growing awareness of my unalterable aloneness—and realizing, with a feeling equal in immensity to the earlier feelings of existential tragedy, that each of these events was minuscule in relation to my eternal destiny and that each experience had added to the beauty that was me.
3. A never-completely-lost awareness of the divinity and allness in every other being. However scarred, however scared, however flawed, each of us contains the allness and each is an aspect of divinity. Each of us is God. My experiences with our beautiful retarded son, Larry, who is ever my guru and teacher, taught me that we always underestimate the allness and potential in every other being. The allness is in every leaf and every animal and every child and every form of life.
4. A new openness to experience. I recall with a smile my earlier provincial arrogance as a young psychology professor. The myths and hopes of operationalism, Carnapian simplistics, behaviorism, and the scientific method infected us all. I forget how many times I proved that there was nothing in psychology that couldn't be measured. I remember a long period when I wouldn't have listened to anyone who talked about some of the things that I am struggling to communicate here. My long years of consulting deprovincialized me to a degree, but my all-in-all experiences taught me not to ignore the most improbable, irrational, and non-replicable of reported experiences. Caution and doubt can have their useful functions, but they do keep us from new and redemptive experience. Amid the nonsense and even quackery in the newly-fermenting world are some verities that will change our lives in ways that permit no turning back.
5. A new appreciation for the non-rational and non-verbal. I find, now, that it is much easier to communicate with children. Animals treat me differently. I spend less time trying to make my experiences and my motives and my feelings rational. Reason is a powerful tool, but there are more powerful ones. Trust-Level theory is my effort to transcend the limits of measurement and rationality in devising theory.

I am only beginning to see some of the implications of these views for modern organizational life. Many executives and others interested in organizations share these interests, hopes, and glimmerings. I think we are beginning to "crack the cosmic egg" and open up a new vision of organizational life. I am reporting in detail in a later book in this series my own transcendental and cosmic experiences and my speculations and beliefs about the transcendental organization.

In the remainder of the book I will use the guidelines and the sketch of the basic theory as presented in preliminary fashion in the first four chapters to examine how the theory might be applied in a variety of situations.

Chapter 6 deals with counseling, therapy, marriage, friendship, and other dyadic relationships. Chapter 7 deals with group therapy, family life, group-process training, team-building, and other group relationships.

Chapters 8 and 9 deal with organizations, management, organizational development, consulting, and the experimental organizations that we have created as both demonstrations and tests of executive. TORI Associates is a non-profit prototype organization that is a radical application of TORI theory to modern organization theory. This will be discussed along with a number of other ventures that are in various stages of birthing.

Chapter 9 is a description of community development as it applies to churches, businesses, neighborhoods, therapeutic settings, recreation, and other aspects of societal life. I will discuss the TORI community experiences as one application of TORI theory to community development.

Chapter 11 discusses government and social action in relation to TORI theory. Chapter 12 takes an extrapolative look at the future, a "TORI'ed" look at what might happen to us in the next generation.

Go on to Chapter 6