The Secret of the Golden Flower

Wise Innovation and The Alchemical Arts

This month I was invited to be a guest lecturer at The Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation at The College of Engineering, UC Berkeley. In 2020 they launched The Berkeley Master of Design (Berkeley MDes), a new professional graduate program jointly co-stewarded by the College of Engineering and the College of Environmental Design. This is a 16-month cross-disciplinary exploration into entrepreneurship, technical innovation, design history, and social justice where students create products in emerging technology across artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, sensing, spatial computing, and the internet of things.

I was incredibly honored and delighted to have experienced such elite offerings, and find immense value in such a high level program. And yet, a certificate that grants one a mastery in design is a curious notion. The older I get, the more I find credentials a funny thing, somehow both incredibly necessary and wholly insufficient. For myself, I’ve come to discover that mastery is a lifelong affair. And so, I decided to share my perspective and experience with a participatory workshop on Taoist philosophical approaches to design, with a Zen Buddhist practice of innovation, and an ecologically-oriented ethic of heart-centered servant leadership. 

Allow me to share some of the foundational concepts and principles below.

Creation from the Crucible

The way of the alchemist, the way of the radagast, the way of the magician, the wizard, and the sage all begin with the creation of the container. Let’s call this concept the crafting of the crucible, as we explore the following three definitions:

Crucible:

1. A container composed of highly refractory material in which metals and other substances are subjected to very high temperatures for the purpose of being melted, dissolved, and broken down.

2. A severe test.

3. A place or situation in which highly concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development.

But what materials are best for crafting the crucible?

In the book Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky shares the following reflection, “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

One hundred and sixty years later, in a 2024 Keynote at The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Summit, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offered the following,

“People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And, unfortunately resilience matters in success. I don't know how to teach it to you, except for— I hope suffering happens to you […]

To this day I use the phrase pain and suffering inside our company with great glee. And, I mean that! [Like,] ‘Boy, this is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering,’ and I mean that in a happy way, because you want to train, you want to refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them.

And greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character, and character isn't formed out of smart people — it's formed out of people who suffered.

And so, if I could wish upon you, […] I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”

So in crafting the crucible, it seems we’ve been offered a potential list of ingredients that greatness requires and a recipe of sorts: a deep heart, a large intelligence, and ample pain and suffering in service to cultivating resilience and strong character.

Let’s start here and explore how these insights might guide our sensing?

If we imagine our bodies as a vessel for alchemy filled with our own unique stories, our own special trials and tribulations— the art of deep design and incomparable innovation is fundamentally a transmutative process – it’s a full bodied creation borne of bone – the sincere cultivation of courage from cowardice, purpose from pain, gratitude from grief, triumph from trauma— all while sidestepping the traps and tropes, the dangerous allure of the perpetually tortured artist, the wounded healer, and the self-deluded messianic guru.

In crafting the crucible, it is our duty to go into the underworld, be touched by it, and return with the golden key.

And yet, in a culture obsessed with its own reflection, afraid of its own shadow, and perpetually engaged in all manner of escape artistry, such a sacrifice seems easier said than done. But perhaps, if we start very small… by pulling upon a single tiny thread… profoundly sewn into the garment of god… maybe… just maybe, the fabric of the universe will unravel its royal arcana for all to wonder.

[Video Link] Initiates Of The Flame - Manly P. Hall - Full Esoteric Documentary and Occult Audiobook w/ visuals

Unlocking the Door and Finding The Golden Thread

For years I had heard it said that there exists a grand, arcane majesty— epically vast and effortlessly eternal, seamlessly bonding all of existence. Life to life. Death to death. And, neither life, nor death as they are— but both and neither, as essentially one and the same. 

An inseparable paradox beyond paradox, such that, once this revelation is realized – all paradox falls away, and only what is, remains.

And, for the longest time, I rejected such notions as complete and utter nonsense– religious riddles and rationally-challenged illogical drivel, the comforting beliefs of weak-minded spiritual folk. Even as I spent decades syncretistically traversing the many scriptures, studying with a rigorously academic mind, it was still hard to get on board with the “infinite consciousness made of light” part.

If psychedelic jaguars hadn’t sold me on divinity decades ago, some musty old enigmatic sacred scrolls sure as heck weren’t going to convince me of anything that smelled vaguely like the intellectually sacrilegious capital g-word.

So, for a long time, I entertained this world as something of a library of cultural bedtime stories that carried with them a fuzzy, elusive, allegorical wisdom. And while the mythopoetics of the epics were intriguing, and the ritual theater enchanting, much of theosophy seemed like the type of waste-your-time fairy magic woo-talk that re-codes god as “source energy” only to smuggle old age dogma in through the backdoor of new age fairy tales. So I disregarded the lot entirely, placing them in the category of ancient entertainment – essentially “what primitive people did before science and technology existed.”

And then I died.

Not once, but many times over, like a tumultuous, decades-long death undertow— ego deaths, physical deaths, spiritual deaths, identity deaths, depersonalization, derealization, disidentification— all of it. From psychedelics to psych wards, I lost myself. I became a seeker. I learned to suffer well. I found myself in the process, stopped seeking, and put down suffering in favor of sipping the sweet serenity of surrender. You know, all the standard initiate clichés of a modern mystic.

But, I didn’t ask for this initiation.

In fact, I fought it… nearly every step of the way. Had you asked me in my twenties, I likely would have told you I’d be well happy with my cushy corporate job, living a comfortable life, raising a family in a well-to-do Silicon Valley suburb. But, evidently the universe had other plans. And so, whether you believe in a sky daddy that grants wishes, or a quantum computer seated beneath the illusion of reality projecting multiverse simulations— there is an undeniable force, a dynamic elegant animate intelligence.

Let’s call this The Golden Thread, a continuity across the cosmos, the chi that keeps the universe together. This force is present at all levels, from micro to macro, holonically self-similar across the infinitely abundant void. Now, take a moment and feel that this golden thread is also alive within us— mind, body, soul, and spirit – all throughout the great chain of being. And, let’s consider the possibility that aligning oneself with the universal current of this golden thread is to walk in the divine waters, the immortal flow of creation— the elixir of life.

Now, here’s where things tend to get a bit sketchy. Egoically seeking immortality through engineering innovation is wildly fraught with incredible hazard and unimaginable risk, but if one listens to the cosmos and learns to dance with the divine design— a secret path emerges, a middle way. For now, let’s call this the Golden Path, a walkway decorated with honeycomb and nautilus shells, drawn of golden ratios, adorned with golden spirals, and held together with all manner of kaleidoscopic fractal.

And still, it’s not as simple as joining some secret society or ancient philosopher cult, and tritely sprinkling a little mystical math and sacred geometry atop a product. This is an actual journey– a real and true and serious, dedicated mission— the reclamation of one’s highest purpose, the regeneration of one’s deepest relationships, the remembering of a most intimate unconditional love, and a return to the prized pearl of collective prosperity– a destiny in service to the whole of life.

Now, if that appeals to your spirit, how do we get out of our own way and repair what has been broken?

The Uncovering: Discovering The Gift That Only You Can Give

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”  - Martha Graham

Creative process researcher David W. Galenson studied the careers of famous painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, and movie directors to uncover the patterns of discovery in our greatest cultural works. And, he found two fundamentally different approaches to innovation: young geniuses, conceptual innovators who work deductively with an end state in mind, and old masters, experimental innovators who work inductively through the process of becoming.

Experimental innovators seek, and conceptual innovators find. Young geniuses peak early, taking pieces of what others have already developed, and recombining them to make it their own. Old masters, on the other hand, wade through decades of doubt and uncertainty, eventually inventing entirely new fields and novel transformative approaches.

Now, resisting the urge to compare, which innovation archetype feels most true to your path?

Due to the ways we resource and support innovation, the mystery of becoming and the wisdom of old masters is often lost to the whims of fools. Instead, the world of emerging exponential technology, Silicon Valley in particular, perpetuates a culture that fetishizes neurodivergent young prodigies— a place where the ideal startup founder stereotype is a socially awkward, emotionally stunted Ivy League dropout, breathlessly professing that their product will undoubtedly save the world while magically making investors insanely wealthy.

So, in an impatient race-to-market world, how might we uncover the deep gifts that only old masters can give? And how do we move beyond this silly saviorism, into our post-heroic suprahero era?

Mastery of Design: True Wisdom is Countercultural

Can a baby fix a marriage? Can a child restore a family system? Can a teenager repair a lineage? Why might a society rely on its children to innovate their way out of a brokenness built by older generations? Is it not the duty of the elder to protect and provide for the young, offering guidance and mentorship, leadership and an invite into the practice of wise stewardship?

Why have we asked the children to show us the way? What is it that we have forgotten?

I find that many innovation hubs celebrate something of a juvenile delinquent culture— chanting the sacred mantra of immaturity: move fast and break things. It’s often spoken by a well-meaning spirit with an adolescent heart that has no relationship to responsibility, self-centeredly seeking only to fulfill its own insatiable appetite. This is not morally bad, only developmentally young— understandably naive and inexperienced. This is the adversarial “I wanna do whatever I want” teenager who threatens to tattoo their face as soon as they leave the house, vowing to substitute vegetable dinners with breakfasts of ice cream and cookies, pizza and beer.

It’s an innovation culture with a shared worldview that lacks the direct lived experience of any serious consequence that would enable it to understand and value the affordances that rules and discipline enable. And, with the promise of reaping such great reward, it's happy to push risk and harm onto others. The holy principle of this mantra is “internalize benefit, externalize cost.” Many of these cultures tend to mythologize freedom and romanticize liberty in a way that a child might, seeing themselves as a perpetual victim of constraints and structure— defiant in the face of forced naps, resentful of routine, and utterly belligerent by bedtime. 

So, when a juvenile delinquent innovation culture inevitably breaks some aspect of society, it absolves itself by appealing to the perceived parent who it depends on to constrain, reprimand, and rush in to pick up all the pieces.

So where are the parents?

Well, in my humble opinion, we’re in a Peter Pan and the Lost Boys situation— no parents to be found. Instead, it has become commonplace for uninitiated olders to masquerade as elders, gathering up the young eggs of other mothers, placing them in incubators, and burning financial fires to accelerate their growth. And sadly, it seems that Never Neverland is a place where all memory is erased, a place that knows no bounds, knows no time.

So not a one grasps the wisdom of friction, and thus the eggs are told to optimize for fragility by overvaluing ease and convenience. So too is lost the wisdom of the cycles and of proper proportion, so all growth becomes inherently good, and the eggs are told to scale exponentially into infinity. And tragically lost was the knowledge of interdependence with the web of life, so the eggs are instructed to disrupt the balance by running widespread cultural experiments on unsuspecting others, and told to create powerful magics and viral illusions, and to democratize weaponry throughout the land. 

And above the nest, a foreboding sign reads “win at all cost, for do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” so all the eggs quickly learn that innovation is the art of whatever you can get away with.

And, by the time the eggs hatch, strange creatures emerge— not bright and promising nestlings, but sad monsters, an exotic class of odd cryptids with grotesque Janus-faced heads that speak from both sides of two mouths. But as not to frighten with their hideous nature, the Lost Boys sprinkle fairy dust upon each forehead, transforming their appearance. And quickly grows, a horn between each eye, and a long tail from each rear. And call them unicorns, decacorns, hectocorns, mincorns, and soonicorn they do— but all of them strange beasts in one way or another.

And the Lost Boys celebrate with fanfare and parade, and all are hypnotized by the convoy of canines and the procession of ponies. Then cometh the spectacle of public auction where shillings rain down from the sky upon the block. And all of Neverland cheers and lauds and praises the olders for the creation of cloak-and-veil monstrosities, as if they were wise old owls— but owls they are not.

And such has been the way for many years in Neverland. Never a parent to be found, so the children play games of magic beans and golden geese, of uninitiated apprentices casting uncontrollable spells, of stealing fire from the gods and opening many a Pandora's box. But alas, the mantra of maturity.

Move mindfully and mend things is the way of the master.

A culture of mastery is one that has developed beyond the frenzied pleasure-seeking missile of the adolescent adrenaline junky. It’s a culture that has thrown caution to the wind so many times that it’s grown tired of the sewing of death and the reaping of sorrow, dissatisfied with finite games and mortal innovation. Cultures of mastery choose rites of passage, they choose to grow up, choose to grapple with the multitudes folded in time. And through this maturation process, a shift into wisdom, a certain second sight that can pierce through the veil. And comes with it, a sense of the longview, the long now, and the ancient cycles. And, comes with it the type of precision and attention to detail that aligns monoliths with cosmic constellations— the immortal innovation that builds pyramids and Parthenons, not products and platforms.

So how does one acquire the deep second sight of wise innovation mastery?

Deep Design is an Inside Job: Moving Beyond Perfection

“Practice non-action. Work without doing. Taste the tasteless. Magnify the small, increase the few. Reward the bitterness with care. See simplicity in the complicated. Achieve greatness in little things. In the universe the difficult things are done as if they are easy.

In the universe great acts are made up of small deeds. The sage does not attempt anything very big, And thus achieves greatness. Easy promises make for little trust. Taking things lightly results in great difficulty. Because the sage always confronts difficulties, He never experiences them.” – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching Verse 63

The scientific mind likes to frame innovation as an exclusively external process, as if our knowledge of math and reason could somehow isolate us, cleanly separating us from the messy, embedded relational complexity of existence. Decades of rigorous academia tends to entrain our vision and cloak our sense of self in the costume of the purely logical, independent observer— too often rendering the aspirational design eye as an omni-perspectival amalgamation of all objective propositional knowledge — as if design is something that happens outside of us.

Some like to think of precision as a high-fidelity surgical sterility, a snapshot of perfect fit. But, what if precision could breathe? What if innovation is an infinite game, an immortal process that morphs and changes over time across the evolutionary ebbs and flows?

What might it look like to design from natural intelligence?

We design cities and software, transportation and supply chains, but do they not also design us? And what might it mean to design with our whole body— design from the depths of our soul? To design in intimate relationship with the more than human world? To listen to the land and design from the feet, out from the gut— an innovation that flows right through the center of the heart? What might it look like to draft from dream and ritual, to dance cities into being and sing software into service?

[Video Link] Indigenous Wisdom: Songlines | Great Maps Explained

What might it look like to be in a deeper conversation with creation?

“The Western world is obsessed by perfection, by symmetry, and ideal proportion. This is a taste for beauty shaped by reverence for universal laws, mathematics, and an appetite for the perfect and the eternal. Japanese aesthetics are, however, very different indeed, and the core of the difference is captured in a term for which Western languages have no direct equivalent: a term known as Wabi-Sabi.

Wabi-Sabi refers to the beauty of the impermanent, the imperfect, the rustic, and the melancholy. It derives not from the love of invincibility, youth and flawlessness, but from a respect for what is passing, fragile, slightly broken and modest. Wabi-sabi believes the things are always more beautiful forbearing the marks of age and individuality; a trickle of glaze or a beautifully repaired crack on a piece of pottery are to be appreciated rather than made invisible.

Wabi-sabi's history is intimately linked with Buddhism and its suggestion that wisdom comes from making peace without transitory, imperfect and unheroic natures.” – Alain de Botton, The School of Life

Cracks in the Cauldron: A Wholeness From Fragments

It has been said of The Way, that “Under Heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil.”

“Perhaps no one understands fire or disease better than the fireman or physician, professionals dedicated to battling these menaces. The same is often true of warriors and war. And though some warriors are enamored with war, I am no more a fan of it than a doctor is a lover of disease or death. Still, how can we hope to prevent wars or prevail in wars thrust upon us without understanding war?” – Brig. Gen. Geoffrey F. Weiss, The New Art of War

Every wise walker understands the basic principle of polarity – to truly know peace, one must study war; to truly know life, one must study death. And after a deep, many-decades study of death, I find myself enamored with compost. A rotting that renews is truly a magic like no other. So, on the topic of death and design, let’s learn from the wise inquiries of compost.

What must die in us such that new creations can be born? What must be emptied, what must be cleared? What must be burned to ash and blown by wind? What must fall apart, so that new things may come together?

For the past ten years, Stanford Graduate School of Business has been a home to Graham Weaver, founder and partner of Alpine Investors, a people first private equity firm in San Francisco which has been investing in software and services for over 20 years. He has a memorable provocation from his Last Lecture Series, that may help us ground our Taoist koans and Sophian mysticism into practical phronesis. In it he says,

“A number of years ago there was a video of a woman, and she's talking to her boyfriend, and she says, ‘I feel all this pressure. I have headaches. I can't sleep,” and she just seems like she's hopeless. But, her boyfriend looks at her a little confused. And he says,

‘well, you could take the nail out of your head.’

And then, you see that she turns, and you realize she has a nail sticking out of her head. And it seems pretty obvious. And then she says, ‘it's not about the nail,’ and she wants to talk about anything and everything except the thing that's actually going to make her unstuck.

Unfortunately, this is also true with a lot of us. We are walking around most of the time with a nail in our head.”

So what is the nail in your head? And what do you gain by keeping it in place? And alternatively, what might you gain by removing it?

Now whether it’s a nail or a thorn, an ax or a splinter, it’s often a wonder why we hold on so tightly to our attachments, our familiar aches, our painful partnerships, our ties to torment, our bonds to brokenness. There is a well known Zen Story about The Tea Master and the Broken Cup summed up with the following quote:

“You see this goblet?” asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.” – Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

When approaching deep design considerations of what to let go and what to keep, I’m reminded of this story of impermanence, of the monk whose cup is already broken, juxtaposed with the philosophy of wabi sabi and the practice of kintsugi.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of “golden joinery,” a Zen Buddhist practice of restoring broken pottery by mending areas of breakage with gold.

“In Zen aesthetics, the broken pieces of an accidentally smashed pot should be carefully picked up, reassembled and then glued together with lacquer inflected with the most expensive gold powder. There should be no attempt to disguise the damage. The point is to render the fault lines beautiful and strong. The precious veins of gold are there to emphasize that breaks have a philosophical merit all of their own [...]

In an age that worships youth, perfection, and the new, the art of Kintsugi retains a particular wisdom as applicable to our own lives as it is to pots: That care and love expended on the shattered pieces should also encourage us to respect what is damaged and scarred, vulnerable and imperfect, starting with ourselves and those around us.” –  Alain de Botton, School of Life

[Video Link] Kintsugi, the ancient art of making shattered dishes whole

Starting with Ourselves: Designing Out From The Center

I’ve spent nearly a decade designing custom sage leadership curricula to develop wiser, more heart-centered organizations. From universities and industry to military and government— they all start with leading oneself. All things ripple out from our center. No matter what the unique needs or specific goals of an organization, there’s no getting around the fact that living by example is the coreto leading by example.

And it is no different with design and innovation.

We are not separate from our designs. We are not separate from our innovations. Not only that, but we cannot be separated from them any more than a growing baby can be separated from the womb of its own mother— or a child can be separated from the genetics, lineage, and heritage of its own parents.

Our technologies are born of our essence— our quality, our level, and our capacity for care— or our lack thereof.

As seed capital flows into new eggs, into the wombs of innovation, our inspirations and ideas move from conception into manifestation. The energy that brings life into existence is the same energy that designs civilizations, the same creative spark that brings innovation to market, the same powerful motion that births stars into the cosmos. It is the divine creative force.

Wise innovators are thus tasked with the sacred midwifery of new possibility, delivering the great promise of new worlds.

So how do we live deep design? How do we walk the path of wise innovation? And birth courageous creations from our own uniquely crafted crucibles?

Well, let me first say that many very smart people tend to almost be too smart for their own good, especially so-called intellectuals— academics, experts, scholars, those with fancy letters before and after their names — basically anybody whose identity is tied to their cognitive intelligence, anyone whose validation is wrapped up in being seen as knowledgeable, or anyone whose paycheck depends on “having all the right answers.”

I used to be very much like this, always using the tyranny of “yeah, I already know” to skip ahead to the seemingly more advanced material, bypassing anything that might slow me down, especially the practice of simple, mundane things. And, I’ve found that there’s something like a wisdom Dunning-Kruger effect where some mistakenly assume that if you simply read all the knowledge and collect all the insights, it will somehow magically transform into wisdom through the power of emergence, without any actual dedicated practice.

I call this the Pelé Problem.

This is a general issue across all domains, but it essentially boils down to this… imagine you’re a child enamored with the sport of fútbol. You read every book there is to read about the legendary fútbol player Pelé. You’re so engrossed with soccer that you go on to read every book ever written about the sport, becoming something of an expert in the history, culture, strategy and physics of the game. In fact, you’re such a well-informed and talented researcher and storyteller that you write a New York Times bestseller on the topic.

And, as you gain great fame and notoriety, you’re invited to play in a global celebrity match with some of the best players on Earth. And, at the first soft kick off pass, you fall flat on your face and nearly break your ankle, as if you barely knew how to move your body at all. It’s an embarrassing moment for you, but even more shocking for everyone in the crowd as they quickly come to realize that— the people who are the best at talking about the thing, are rarely the best at actually doing the thing.

I don’t care how many books you’ve read on soccer, you’ll never come anywhere close to winning the World Cup without decades of practice.

Being in and of the Practice: Know It by Being It

In a space where the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao, and there are no enlightened beings only enlightened action — there is no second hand wisdom, no wisdom by proxy — only practice and praxis. So let’s focus on the fundamentals. In a talk at Maharishi International University, acclaimed film maker David Lynch shared the following:

“Like they say on the airplane, 'First put your mask on, and then help those next to you put theirs on. My friend Charlie Lutes used to say, ‘There’s a guy crying on the curb, and you go down to comfort him, and pretty soon there’s two guys crying on the curb.’

So, compassion, appreciation for others, understanding for others, being able to help others— it’s something that isn’t gonna happen up here.

[Lynch flutters his fingers, gesturing above his head in reference to heady, conceptual self transcendence, then he continues].

You start diving down and experiencing this ocean of pure love, pure peace… you could say it’s pure compassion —you experience that, and know it by being it.

Know it by being it.

Then you go out. And then you can really do something for people. You carry that. You glow with that. You’re really doing it. It’s not about talking.”

“A man is not called wise because he talks and talks again; but if he is peaceful, loving and fearless then he is, in truth, called wise.” ― Dhammapada, The Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha

Fundamental #1: Mask On, Mask Off; Wax On, Wax Off

In airplane preflight safety briefings, we’re told that in the event of an emergency, we need to stabilize our oxygen source before we help others. And likewise, in the mastery of deep design, we learn to care for ourselves in the ways that we want our future innovations to care for others— we learn the consistency of nourishing sleep; we learn the consistency of eating nourishing foods; we learn the consistency of moving our bodies in nourishing ways, and tending to our health— mind, body, soul, and spirit.

This is the Fundamental Deep Design Principle of “As Above So Below, As Within, So Without.”

We exist as a microcosm of the world we seek to create. So with our bodies, we model the design and innovation outcomes we seek to birth into the world. When we choose to bypass our initiation into the rites of passage, into the knowledge of healing oneself, we inevitably design and build systems with the same blind spots, the same traumas, the same shadows, and energetic patterns we carry in our bodies.

And, we will do it all with the best of intentions— harming what we intend to help, hurting what we intend to heal, damaging what we intend to mend, breaking what we intend to fix, degenerating what we intend to cultivate, destroying what we intend to create, and eventually killing what we intend to enliven.

It is truly up to the innovators, the designers, the technologists and engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, and financiers to all courageously choose their sacred roles as systems healers— to mature, and grow to understand their noble responsibility as wise stewards of life.

And, there is no way to “out think” this process, no wisdom of the crowd shortcut, no mind over matter hack— our creations are a direct reflection of the consciousness we carry. So, we must learn to live in the energy and create from the state that we intend our design and innovations to give rise to in others.

Fundamental #2: Just Take the Dang Nail Out of Your Head Already

When removing a nail from a skull, new bony shards may break off and once-hidden fractures may become much more clearly visible. And, when we approach these tender spots with dispassionate curiosity, we open up space for us to let go, while also offering the potential for repair.

Let’s sit with this paradox for a moment, holding both perspectives, and maybe even feeling a sense of tension in our bodies — a both/and way of being that says,

Yes, a sacred preciousness for all things in their perfect unbroken original wholeness. Yes, a sacred preciousness for all things in their imperfect broken fragmentation. Yes, a sacred preciousness for all things in their perfectly imperfect reintegrated wholeness.

To be wise in our innovation necessitates that we design from a space that is in service to all of life. There is no alternative. We must fully say YES to life. And, in fully saying Yes to life — we must inevitably fully say Yes to death. As they are inseparable, like darkness and light, they are one and the same, each a perspective that only exists because of the other — indivisibly in service to their shared union.

And as we enter, like fireflies in the abyss — saying Yes to the darkness, Yes to the grief, Yes to the pain, Yes to all of our shadows, our multiplicity of parts, our symphony of selves — a new experience naturally unfolds.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche describes this shift in perspective with the following, “There are heights of the soul from which even tragedy ceases to look tragic.”

“Most of us are familiar with the archetype of the Dark Shadow: the repressed dark side hidden within us. But we’re probably not familiar with the archetype of the Golden Shadow: the repressed gold hidden within our darkness. The golden shadow symbolizes withheld courage, hidden talents, repressed passion and stifled creativity. It’s the unfulfilled potential that people fail to see or develop because of fear and a lack of risk-taking.” – Gary Z McGee, The Golden Shadow: Stepping into the Power of Who You Really Are 

True fearlessness is developing the right relationship with risk-taking, the type of noble risk that yields a gold of another kind— an immeasurable, incomparable wealth beyond wealth.

Fundamental #3: Cleaning Up The 10,000 Things

There is a common phrase found in Taoist and Buddhist writings to connote the material diversity of the universe, the multitudes of that which can be named, “The Ten Thousand Things.” Lao Tzu, for example, writes in the 42nd verse of the Tao Te Ching:

Tao produced the One.
The One produced the two.
The two produced the three.
And the three produced the ten thousand things.

And so, our next fundamental deep design practice is brought to us by highly controversial figure, Jordan B. Peterson, Canadian psychologist, public speaker and author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos.

“Imagine you're dealing with someone who's hoarding. Now, people who are hoarding are often older or neurologically damaged, or they have obsessive-compulsive disorder. But then, you walk into their house and there's like 10,000 things in their house.

There's maybe a hundred boxes, and you open up a box and in the box there's some pens and some old passports and some checks and their collection of silver dollars and some hypodermic needles and some dust and a dead mouse and there's boxes and boxes and boxes like that in the house.

It's absolute chaos in there— absolute chaos! Not order, chaos! And then you think, ‘Is that their house, or is that their being? Is that their mind?’ And the answer is: there's no difference. There's no difference.

So, I could say well, if you want to organize your psyche, you could start by organizing your room […] So, you go clean up under your bed, and you make your bed and you organize the papers on your desk, and you think, ‘well, just exactly what are you organizing? Are you organizing the objective world, or are you organizing your field of being— like your field of total experience?’

And Jung believed that, and I think there's a Buddhist doctrine that's sort of nested in there, that at the highest level of psychological integration— there's no difference between you and what you experience […] And the first question might be, ‘why should you even bother improving yourself?’

And I think the answer to that is something like, ‘so you don't suffer anymore stupidly than you have to, and maybe so others don't have to either.’ It's something that, you know… like, there's a real injunction at the bottom of it.

It's not some casual self-help doctrine. It's that if you don't organize yourself properly — you'll pay for it— and in a big way! And so will the people around you.”

Dogfooding Your Own Deep Design

There’s a popular bible verse, Matthew 7:3-5 about hypocrisy and casting  judgment, it reads, “How can you say to your brother, `Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.”

Now, if we look at this same verse through the lens of deep design, perhaps a useful interpretation is something more like, “before we can truly heal others, we must first be able to heal ourselves. Before one can design right pattern in the world and innovate wisely in service to all of life, one must first be able to align with the universal vitality — the deep design within the self.”

There is no skipping this step. And, don’t let the Lost Boys tell you otherwise, theirs is not an interest in wisdom, nor dedication to mastery— theirs is the business of harvesting young genius, cracking eggs and making omelets from unsuspecting baby birds.

Hint: The One Secret I’ll Share With You

So, if deep design and wise innovation is your journey of mastery, I’ll offer up a head start— a cryptographic cipher to an esoteric map. It’s an outline that’s taken decades to fully capture succinctly… here it is:

Inside your heart there is a golden path. And upon this path, a golden key. And with this key unlock a tiny hidden door. And beyond this door, sit three illuminations: the golden thread, the golden elixir, and the golden shadow. And into the shadow apply the elixir to begin the golden rejoinery. Then with this thread, mend and repair, carefully stitching each of the sacred scars. And grow out from these scars a single golden flower, the brilliant bud of new worlds and the return to a golden age.

Wise innovations emerge from this place. Allow your designs to arise from here.

[Video Link] The Taoist Book That Changes Everything | The Secret Of The Golden Flower | Wilhelm and CG Jung - Chinese Inner Alchemy Audiobook

If you’d like to hire me, please find me at Dyer Global Solutions and The Institute of Wise Innovation. And do please leave a comment below with feedback and suggestions to help me improve. Let me know what I got wrong, what felt confusing and unclear, or what felt right to you, so I too may learn and grow.