I'M Where? #1

In Episode 34,  we’re doing something a little different. From the last sessions, Tom May has pulled together a matrix that he is now using in his work and life. We thought that we might share it with you and see how you might refine it with us. 

Tom was inspired to combine the original metacognitive work by our mother Mary May with the new work that I have been doing with Jeremy Johnson on Jean Gebser’s book, Ever Present Origin. 

You can download Tom’s matrix from our website at dynamic competence.com under Season 3 podcasts, Session 34 if you want to look at it. Think of a box with 3 columns and 3 rows. At the top of the columns three of Gebser’s structures of consciousness, Magic, Mythic, and Mental are listed. At the end of the rows three metacognitive perspectives, Instinctive, Intentional, and Integral are arranged top to bottom. 

For this podcast, Tom is presenting these structures of consciousness and perspectives from the unique way that he processes this information. Of course, this is only one way of looking at it. Next time, we will dive deeper into what is inside of this matrix. Take a listen and see what you get from it. 

Transcript

Thomas May I’M Where? 1.27.23

Susan Clark: [00:00:01] Well, welcome back to the podcast, Tom. It's so great to have you here. And I want to thank all of our listeners who've really reached out to us and let us know how much they appreciate as we're trying to engage this new work that we're in.

Tom May: [00:00:17] It's great to be back. And there definitely is a little bit of excitement in the air. And I think really the excitement is that you're actually watching the dynamic process unfold in front of you. What's happening to us is this realization that the work we've been working on has led us to this point. But we always had felt there's components and pieces that just haven't really fit in yet. And then it was a little bit of the aha moment that we had in which we've taken work from the Gebser side, brought in the work from our mom, Mary May, and all of a sudden it was like a collision, two icebergs running into each other and it was this whole kind of combination of now being able to see patterns. And as you looked at the patterns, they start to fall into place in which we can see certain components and be able to actually account for things that we really weren't quite sure of or didn't draw in yet.

Susan Clark: [00:01:15] So, Tom, let's talk a little bit about what it was we came to the table with. What this podcast has been about up to the most recent times. Tom, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast again. And I do want to thank all of our listeners for reaching out to us and really encouraging and I might even say challenge us to put together and talk overtly about what we're experiencing as we've looked at integrating what we've been practicing for years with a lot of this new material.

Tom May: [00:01:47] And great to be back. And there definitely is an excitement in the air, at least for me. And I know for some of our listeners who've actually given the feedback. And that excitement comes from watching the whole Dynamic Competence process unfold in front of you. We're experiencing it. We're doing it right now, and we've always had a piece of this feeling component that it was not this mental thought, but more of this feeling, more of storytelling, more of this kind of a little bit ambiguous piece of it. And we never really knew how it fit into the bigger structure of the metacognition that our mom, Mary May, spoke about.

Susan Clark: [00:02:27] Yes, Tom, And for any of you listening, Moms original, Mary May's original podcast was number seven back in our series. Do you want to summarize, Tom, what she's really been talking about in this metacognitive process?

Tom May: [00:02:44] Absolutely. So for our listeners, they know we've always been trying to expand from an instinctual set, reactionary type world and into a more of a conscious waking up and then seeing it for what it is and getting to a more of an intentional place. And then as we ground ourselves and being more intentional, we actually even have the ability to move even broader in the sense in getting to that integral side.

Susan Clark: [00:03:12] And we've been doing that for years, right? You and I have picked up on both mom and Dad's work. We've been teaching all of the skill sets to move from that instinctual reactive place, that hierarchy. Begin to open up. Things are bothering us. It's not working well. We open up, we begin to listen to others and try new things. It's that collaborative space, that intentional, collaborative space that lets us move forward. But like you, I think I never really felt comfortable with how we were describing that, which was integral. There were some pieces missing. Did you feel the same way Tom?

Tom May: [00:03:49] Well, I would even say, Susan, I even felt there was pieces missing in the intentional side, too. I think it was a combination of when you're in that intentional and   integral, it's very thought driven. Having these components that draw in that were just not pure thought over time, it was always seemed to be a slightly off and we couldn't quite reconcile them.

Susan Clark: [00:04:15] And I felt the same way, you know, when I would do meditation, when I would do yoga, tai chi, different practices, I never felt like I was truly integrating them into my mental. It's like they sat aside. They were a great platform, but I didn't have a way of really integrating those pieces together. I could become more efficient, more capable in my mental, I could become more capable in my felt sense, but I didn't feel them integrating together. And it's a really about a consciousness. I wasn't conscious of how they could integrate. And that's the kind of excitement that I'm feeling, is that ability to begin to consciously understand how no matter what I'm doing, how those pieces can integrate together in a relatively simple way.

Tom May: [00:05:06] Yeah, I think putting even more simplistic terms the way I was always approaching it so many times was you would have these aha moments, you would have these stories that would occur, these senses, these feelings that would happen to you. And I would drag them back into very much a rigid or a process focus, It was like I was almost trying to translate them back into more of this mental view of how I would solve things, especially from myself as the engineer. It was always nice to get things down and steps and processes and flows and what I'm realizing is that it's not one translated to the other, but for all to be equally balanced, to be able to be in all places at one time, not drag things back into your paradigm or your map.

Susan Clark: [00:05:55] That's fabulous, Tom. And of course, the new work that I'm doing around Gebser has started to give us a framework that begins to let us feel into what it is that we're experiencing. Directly, feel into it, tell stories about it, and then put that into conceptual models. But each one being valid. 

Tom May: [00:06:18] Agree. And then so I'm going to step into that Gebserian model, which would say all of a sudden you can start looking at things not just from a very mental side, which is like, how do I think about it? How do I process it? But you also can look at things as mythic, what is the story that's occurring or even the magic, which is what is the event that happened to you? What was this thing that occurred that was kind of mysterious and out of the blue and impacted you? Now all of a sudden you don't see them as individual events or all lumped into mental. You actually can see them for what they are in each of their aspects.

Susan Clark: [00:06:58] And as an engineer, I totally get that's how you approach it. Some of the people that I've been working with recently actually come at it from a different way. They're so committed to getting into the magic. They want to throw away the mental and keep it separate. They're now beginning to realize that the painting or the poems are the stories that they're creating to help engage more people into the magic in themselves. But just that statement is a mental concept. And so with that work that they're doing, they're beginning to see, just like you did, coming from a different direction, that magic, mythic and mental all can coexist, none superior to the others.

Tom May: [00:07:43] It's just like what we've always talked about instinctual, intentional and integral. You ebb and flow through those. You can be highly reactionary. You've got to go do something that's got to be done. You're very much in that instinctual make it happen mode. You then have something odd that happens, it wakes you up, you pull into the intentional, what's going on here? Why is this different than what I was expecting? And then the integral side is even a little bit further out or more broad, in which you are now trying to figure out, well, how do I solve this? How do I understand different solutions that can occur? The same thing needs to be happening in the other side, where sometimes I have to be highly mental, but then other times I have to be telling a story. I have to be in the mythic world or other times I need to be paying attention when things occur around me that are actually giving me the signals and the signs to potentially look at a different direction or find a different solution. And I have to be open to that.

Susan Clark: [00:08:40] Well, Tom, can you give our listeners an example of it in your work today of how You can use magic, mythic and mental, the experience, the stories and the concepts in your work today.

Tom May: [00:08:55] So I think a great example, Susan is at work, right? You have a very mental approach, which is we're trying to improve performance, we're trying to have a higher output. But there's also another major component. How are the employees feel about being at work? Do they feel that they're part of a group? Do they feel like they're being engaged and they're bringing value and they wake up in the morning wanting to come to work because they can add that next piece, right? So that's a very kind of mythic story that goes on surrounding the work you're doing. And then the last is the magic piece. The magic is when an employee out of the blue walks in and goes, I have this idea we could do X, Y, and Z, and all of a sudden everybody is like, Wow, how did we never even see that? And all of a sudden we kind of pivot, we kind of work it through the story of what they're trying to get to. And then we chunk down and we get it into an actual executable. The ability to then take that idea that just kind of came out of the blue and implement it and see how well it performs.

Susan Clark: [00:10:00] And Tom, you've had so much experience with all of these training programs for people. I have a sense that the ones that are good, the ones that have been most successful, are the very ones who, whether they do it overtly or not, pick up that mythic piece, the storytelling, and also value people getting in there and trying something out and having something to say about that. Does that idea resonate with you?

Tom May: [00:10:29] Absolutely, because we have a tendency to dismiss what I guess I can term those soft attributes. What is the employee contribution? Is a term we always hear. And it's that's so vague and it's so hard because we don't have a language for that. We have all these measures that we use off of scorecards and everything else. But that's performance driven, right? When you come off a scorecard and you just have conversations with employees and you work with them and you engage them, right, that's a story unto itself. And they are seeing themselves folded into the story, if you're bringing them in. And you're absolutely right, I think we touch on it, but nobody seems to overtly speak to that. And I think the worrisome part for many is that you really can't measure it. Well, I think the reality of what we're discovering is, guess what? If you want a balanced crew, you're going to have some things you're going to be able to measure down to the decimal point. But then you have these other things in which you have to say, look, they're a critical part of it. You can't measure it. How do we engage that?

Susan Clark: [00:11:34] Well, what I think I'm hearing you say, Thomas, we have to be conscious of them and know that they're there and they may not translate directly into our mental conceptual frameworks. Have you found anyone who's been able to communicate both magic and mythic metrics? I don't know what we would call them. How would we do that?

Tom May: [00:11:56] Yeah, I'm not sure we'd have the term metrics there. I mean, we'll think more about that one. But I do know so much work that I've done on the mindfulness side, and it really talks about the feeling component and what do you feel inside and what do you feel as the group? And I think that's the gateway. I think that's the part that we need to explore more, is how do you put ourselves in a safe enough environment so we can tell stories on the mythic and allow our see ourselves to actually see magic when it happens and call it for what it is and have a conversation about it.

Susan Clark: [00:12:31] Great. So that if your ultimate goal is to get a certain output, that output comes in through this messiness that you may not be able to to measure. And you know how important it is. You create a culture around it, and a conscious culture.

Tom May: [00:12:48] I like what you just said there, the messiness of it, because it's that jump from mental to mythic and even more from mythic to magic. It does start to get messy. For us to be able to holistically improve, right, we have to learn to figure out the messy parts of it.

Susan Clark: [00:13:07] I hope our listeners get a sense that the work that we've been doing for years and years and years has focused on the mental, making the mental as efficient and as effective as possible. But it's been the mental. And that what we're acknowledging is that both magic and mythic are important parts to how we live in this world and how we integrate and create solutions for ourselves and for others. And that's a really important understanding and that no matter what we're working on, whatever kinds of programs in whatever fields, most likely there's going to be a magic, mythic and mental component to whatever you're doing. Just as Fred Sigman showed us so nicely in the last podcast.

Tom May: [00:13:58] I agree, and I like your phraseology to keep it very simple, right? So you live in the magic, you experience in storytelling and the mythic, and then you build the conceptual in the mental and it just does ebb and flow. They go up and down and they work with each other.

Susan Clark: [00:14:16] Perfect. What I'd be fun to do now if our listeners will hang in there with us, is to really talk a moment briefly about summarizing what we talk about in this mental. And what Gebser would call an efficient mental, a mental that is able to be open, a mental is able to solve problems that it didn't know possible before, that there's a process that originally our mother, Mary May, developed that we've been using that has to do with instinctive, intentional and integral. Can you talk a little bit about that, Tom?

Tom May: [00:14:50] So if I'm instinctual and I'm in the mental right, I'm really driving at the component that I'm reacting to maps that have been given to me. So when X happens, I do Y, It's just what's on the map. That's what I do. So I live in the instinctual.

Susan Clark: [00:15:06] And Tom, can I ask you, so when you're living in your instinctual world and things don't match your map, what happens?

Tom May: [00:15:13] Well, that's where the rub comes in. The rub comes in. It's when the maps don't align. What you want to have happen is when the rub occurs, you should then come to consciousness. You should recognize that the solutions you have that you normally run off of, aren't working right now. So that becomes the conscious and you become very intentional. I'm looking at the problem now, I'm looking at the situation and what's occurring, and then I'm comparing maps. Okay, well, that didn't work. But what about this map? What about that map? What about your map? Let's have a conversation and we start really kind of doing the comparison to figure out what's going on. The last component then is you can also not only just look at your maps and other maps, you can also look for what we call the white spaces. The area between the maps, recognizing that you can invent new maps and from those new inventions of new maps, you potentially can find new solutions. So that takes us from the instinctual, pushes it up to the intentional, and then to the integral where we're seeing the broader scope.

Susan Clark: [00:16:16] Well, let me go back a little bit deeper into that. So if you're in your mental instinctive and you're kind of stuck in that perspective, when you feel the rub, you don't turn internally and make changes. What do you do when you feel that rub and you're stuck in that perspective, that instinctive mental perspective?

Tom May: [00:16:34] So if you're the instinctual and you don't raise to a level of consciousness of what you're doing, you're going to lash out, you're going to react to the environment that's around you don't go to self, which is the conscious thing. You push outwards and you look for

Susan Clark: [00:16:50] Right. So it's all externally focused. You're trying to change the world around you versus doing the personal work inside. So that's someone stuck in that kind of instinctual mental. So what does it look like when you are in this intentional mental? Tell me what it feels like and looks like that you've experienced.

Tom May: [00:17:12] Well, when you do come and you have the rub, the different click is that you actually go to self first look at your maps compared to what's happening and start to understand why is it causing the rub, What is actually happening here? And when you actually do the internal look first you have a pause moment, right? And actually the longer you can pause, the more you can look at the given situation, the more you have greater understanding.

Susan Clark: [00:17:41] So you're intentionally changing your behavior by going inside. Well, what about people around you? How do you react to other people around you when you're in this intentional space?

Tom May: [00:17:53] Well, actually, the people around you will actually start to notice that you don't immediately lash out or react. You almost have become quiet and your language is about, well, what's not right here? Am I doing something wrong? What are we doing wrong? Let's let's look at this together. Let's try to figure out what's happening. And it's just a complete different tone. And it also is a completely different feeling you have when you're engaged with other people.

Susan Clark: [00:18:19] Oh, so that's a piece to it as well, Right? What you're describing is that in this intentional space, this intentional mental, you're open to other people's ideas.

Tom May: [00:18:30] Correct.

Susan Clark: [00:18:30] Great. And so let's go one more now and let's go into this integral space. What are you finding in the integral space? What does it look like when you are working in that integral space?

Tom May: [00:18:42] Well, typically what is happening is that you are working through your maps, you're having collaborative communication, you're working with other individuals, and you're starting to recognize that all the current maps you have aren't sufficient enough, that they're not able to provide the guidance in the direction that you want to go. So what you then have to do is start to say, well, wait a minute, are we missing something here? Are there other maps? Can we create our own map? You start having a conversation about what we call those white spaces. What else could potentially be there? And let's start talking about and brainstorming on other concepts that may potentially help us develop new maps.

Susan Clark: [00:19:21] And the piece that I found, as you describe that, Tom, that really got me excited initially, unconsciously, I felt that both Gebser's magic and mythic were some of the information in that white space that I wanted access to. And that's how I began to engage Gebser is because at that integral I wanted language, I wanted a felt sense. I wanted stories that help me describe that white space better. What do you hear in what I just said?

Tom May: [00:19:56] Well, for me, Susan, we have been dabbling around the edges forever, in this spot here, because we always talk about how do you feel? What is the gut reaction? What is the rub that has occurred to you? And this is all language not of a mental process. I mean, this is talking about human feelings and emotion that are involved in here. Well, as soon as you came to me and started talking about the mental, the mythic and the magic, it just opened my mind and I said, wait a minute, just like we're approaching the mental, should we not be approaching the mythic and the magic the exact same way?

Susan Clark: [00:20:32] And I like what you're saying, and I want to do a little bit of a clarification, because when we feel emotions, often emotions both positive and negative, are because our mental maps are not in alignment. The piece that I think that's important in magic, when we start talking about how we live into things, there's something called felt sense. And I love that phrase because felt sense isn't necessarily an emotion. Felt sense is how our body processes that which we've experienced at a non mental level. We're really about feeling into it with or without emotion. But clearly there is a felt sense that comes into it. Have you felt that in your mindfulness work Tom?

Tom May: [00:21:18] Absolutely. So here I am, the engineer living in the mental world. Love the concept of maps. You know, this is just all beautiful for me. And then I go to mindfulness and I'm like, How do I make this whole feeling? Where does your body sit? What feeling comes from the emotion? And I was having a hard time getting them into my mental maps. And then what I've come to realize is not how do I get them into the mental maps when I'm realizing is it's an entity unto itself, right? It's this component of a story, of feeling and how it aligns with mental.

Susan Clark: [00:21:59] I really like that approach of kind of looking at these perspectives across the mental. Can we now do that in the Mythic? Can we jump in and try to explain or feel into what it is that an instinctual, mythic perspective might look like?

Tom May: [00:22:17] Yeah. Susan So just like in the mental side, on instinctual, we use maps, maps that were given to us and maps are typically processed. There flows, right? On the mythic side, they're not maps anymore. They're now stories, stories that were given to us. And think about the broad range of stories that we're talking about as a child. You heard fables and you had fairy tales. As you're growing up, you may have been in an environment in which you lived in a culture where you learned about the land and you learned about all these ways the Earth is taking care of you. And those are stories that influenced you as a child and what you grew up with. So you really established your mindsets and emotions that come for those stories.

Susan Clark: [00:23:02] Or what you're trying to tell me is that these stories make up who we are, and that's part of our truth of who we are when we're in this instinctual, mythic consciousness structure.

Tom May: [00:23:13] Correct. And if you're on the instinctual side, remember, the stories are given to you, you adopt them, and then you react or you have emotion or feeling towards those stories. And the point is, is that you can live in that world. Or one day you then move to what we call the intentional side, where you recognize that, wait a minute, not only are there stories out there, I can tell my own story. I can have my own stories about my life and what's happening. I see the world as I do, and I can tell a story about that.

Susan Clark: [00:23:42] And I think what I'm hearing here is that there's both, there's an understanding that there are multitude of stories out there. You begin to see there isn't one story, but there's a broad range of stories, and it's that amalgamation of those stories that let you begin to tell your own story. You now are connecting your own story from all that's out there.