Bottom Up vs. Top Down

 The whole idea of bottom-up vs. top-down is a perplexing problem to put into words.  I would rather not be seen as picking a fight with the top though I do believe that I am at the bottom.  But it is not as simple as that.  To me this whole situation of bottom-up vs. top-down springs from evolutionary processes.  For instance, we all know that we are very individualized beings throughout the mammalian kingdom and that is true of the plant kingdom as well.  So we as humans are fiercely competitive but also at the same time communal and live in groups a great deal of harmony as a rule.  There seems to be an overarching yin-yang[1] in our life on this planet.  In other words we are highly individualized but would eventually  be homogenized and lazy group in a few generations.  We would not compete with each other to see who can make things better.  But we fight over many things as ego driven individuals.  In an evolutionary sense  it would appear to be all very similar would be a long-term disaster but a short-term nirvana.

A friend has asked me what part of the brain is responsible for dominance and control over another part of the brain in the bottom of the top down process.  This I do not really know.  I suppose with very long term and careful analysis of fMRI's we could find some area of the brain.  But I am more inclined to think there is a more complex issue between the right to left side of the brain.  Complex tasks seem to fire in areas of the brain remote to each other that defy exactly how the brain is wired.  But perhaps wiring is a short sighted view. I am looking at some researchers claims that there is a field effect responsible for communication between individuals.  Thus a school of minnows moves erratically but in unison with each other as though they are operating within the same electromagnetic field.  These are also suppositions however.  But they are interesting to think about.  My insistence on continuing with the supportive person group over the years has been an uncanny feeling that I get when in the double circle. I feel something that I cannot explain which I hope is a non verbal communication between the members of the group.  So perhaps brain wiring is simply part of the system and we are communicating within our brains through a variety of field effects.

So I am following some theoretical leads from the physicist, David Bohm, who passed from us in 1992 but has been kept alive in literature by people who believe that there implicate order to the universe.   Before his death he called upon human beings to meet in small groups in order to bring wholeness to the world.  It was obvious of his distrust of our leaders to help us save the planet and each other.  His belief was that we were so fragmented that we were in danger of destroying ourselves. I was encouraged by this and have been trying to develop an interest in small groups.  As you might have read the book the Power of the Double Circle you would see that it calls for something that David Bohm called dialogue as opposed to shallow discussion.  

Since I first attended the National Training Labs in Bethel Maine over several summers I became aware that the groups that I was in would occasionally reach something different from the usual discussion.  At that point I felt both awe and puzzlement.  Now I look back and see that we had reached dialogue.  Now I define for myself, at least, dialogue which is the combined knowledge and feeling of knowing deeply each other and seeking common ground and solutions.

I now believe that group process is this profound knowing and feeling of each other that yields a continuing rebirth of our common ground in common purpose is human beings.  Otherwise we are fragmented committees seeking to react carefully to each other’s ego and win the meeting.

---

[1] In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang (also yin-yang or yin yang, 陰陽 yīnyáng "dark—bright") describe how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary,interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. (from Wikipedia)