email: 
password: 

No place like Utopia? by Andre Platteel , September 28th

I’m en-route to Shelter Island, the most southerly part of Long Island. From Brooklyn, I take the Utopian Highway, all the way down to what New Yorkers describe as ‘heaven’. A few months earlier I was invited by the Eindhoven Design Academy to lecture on and discuss Utopia. Also invited was Isaac Shapiro, a South African teacher in non-duality, a man who has taught me many things that truly matter to me. Thomas More coined the term Utopia in 1516, in his novel of the same name. In it, he refers to an exotic, non-existent island of perfection. This was in the time that new worlds were being discovered – South and North America, for example, with their new and exotic cultures – giving Europeans hope of a better world after the darkness of the Middle Ages. Before More introduced the term Utopia, a better world was thought of as being something we could only reach after we die: the Christian promise of Heaven. Since More, many utopian worlds have been described, appearing in novels, theories, paintings, films and the dreams of many – each utopia describing a slightly different version of how the perfect world would look. What does Utopia mean? Utopia is often seen as a place where there is no drama, no war, no pain, no racism, no sexism; a place with respect for all that is living, where everyone has equal chances and where everyone is treated with care and love. In short: a place of true perfection. + more I’m en-route to Shelter Island, the most southerly part of Long Island. From Brooklyn, I take the Utopian Highway, all the way down to what New Yorkers describe as ‘heaven’. A few months earlier I was invited by the Eindhoven Design Academy to lecture on and discuss Utopia. Also invited was Isaac Shapiro, a South African teacher in non-duality, a man who has taught me many things that truly matter to me. Thomas More coined the term Utopia in 1516, in his novel of the same name. In it, he refers to an exotic, non-existent island of perfection. This was in the time that new worlds were being discovered – South and North America, for example, with their new and exotic cultures – giving Europeans hope of a better world after the darkness of the Middle Ages. Before More introduced the term Utopia, a better world was thought of as being something we could only reach after we die: the Christian promise of Heaven. Since More, many utopian worlds have been described, appearing in novels, theories, paintings, films and the dreams of many – each utopia describing a slightly different version of how the perfect world would look. What does Utopia mean? Utopia is often seen as a place where there is no drama, no war, no pain, no racism, no sexism; a place with respect for all that is living, where everyone has equal chances and where everyone is treated with care and love. In short: a place of true perfection. Most of us will probably agree that we don’t live in such place: there is pain, there is war, there is poverty, there is fear, there is sickness, there is pollution, we have global warming, we have terrorism (or at least the fear of terrorism), and so on. Despite our efforts to reach a utopian world, not one vision of utopia remains standing. Eve had to spoil the utopian setting of the Garden of Eden, with her apple-biting moment; the Human Potential Movement in the 1960s became, at least in part, a movement of drug abuse, sexual misunderstanding and nihilism; in the novel and film The Beach, jealousy and commerce disturb the utopian setting; Marshall McLuhan’s utopian idea of a Global Mind in which everyone is connected has become a global media manipulation circus that creates confusion and disorientation. Thomas More himself illustrated that utopian worlds are there to fail: in his novel, the perfect island is a religious dictatorship. Every image, every idea of true perfection seems to fail. Which brings us back to the core of what Utopia means: No Place, from the Greek words uo topos. Utopia has no geographic position; utopia cannot be described; utopia cannot be captured in visions, ideals, or concepts; utopia is made to be free in. It is exactly what we are in our essence as consciousness: We – our selves – are made to be free. Utopia cannot be found outside our selves or in ideas; Utopia is to be found in our selves, when all ideas (of how life should be lived) have come to rest. - less tagged:   utopia   NewYork   Shapiro   mind   McLuhan   film   media   marketing   consciousness    permalink  read: 4596  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: André Platteel

World happening by Andre Platteel , September 2nd

For a long time I worked as a strategic consultant for various corporations. This involved putting my ideas into models to meet the desire of both my clients and myself: making the world identifiable, making my strategic ideas understandable, and reassuring others and myself with a logical outcome: ‘If we do this, that will happen.’ During my conversations with clients it had was not uncommon that at some time during the conversation I would take out my pencil and my notebook and that I would draw a circle with some inner-circles, words written in those different circles, interconnecting the words with lines suggesting correlations. Look: this is how reality works! The idea of observing the world, and being able to measure it, has been a fundamental believe in Western civilization. Galileo and Newton are our grandfathers. And as their grandchild, I enjoyed making models - actually I still do. However, I have been noticing - after some time and after the willingness to check the status of my models in reality - that once such a model is created, most of the time reality does not unfold accordingly; instead it is behaviour trying to act accordingly. The models do not placed others and myself in reality, we are placed outside of reality and into our own multi-mirrored worlds. It has been painful to see that the efforts of trying to make reality clear results in these self-created illusions. Once you want to put reality into a model, realty itself just seems to want to go another direction. In a sense reality is like water: once you think you can touch it, the water moves away from you, going in all sorts of unexpected directions. + more For a long time I worked as a strategic consultant for various corporations. This involved putting my ideas into models to meet the desire of both my clients and myself: making the world identifiable, making my strategic ideas understandable, and reassuring others and myself with a logical outcome: ‘If we do this, that will happen.’ During my conversations with clients it had was not uncommon that at some time during the conversation I would take out my pencil and my notebook and that I would draw a circle with some inner-circles, words written in those different circles, interconnecting the words with lines suggesting correlations. Look: this is how reality works! The idea of observing the world, and being able to measure it, has been a fundamental believe in Western civilization. Galileo and Newton are our grandfathers. And as their grandchild, I enjoyed making models - actually I still do. However, I have been noticing - after some time and after the willingness to check the status of my models in reality - that once such a model is created, most of the time reality does not unfold accordingly; instead it is behaviour trying to act accordingly. The models do not placed others and myself in reality, we are placed outside of reality and into our own multi-mirrored worlds. It has been painful to see that the efforts of trying to make reality clear results in these self-created illusions. Once you want to put reality into a model, realty itself just seems to want to go another direction. In a sense reality is like water: once you think you can touch it, the water moves away from you, going in all sorts of unexpected directions. Reality is not here to be captured: reality is here to invite us in its ever-unfolding mysteries. The real realist, it seems to me, is not a visionary who captures reality; the real realist is a mystic who is able to embrace reality in all its different forms, changing every single second. The world is not given, it is happening, every moment, right now. This does not mean that we should neglect models or concepts; they can be of help. As it is of help to me using words to make myself understandable, knowing at the same time that these words can never fully capture the reality that I experience; that they can never transfer the meaning that I experience in its entirely. A model is exactly what it is; it refers to reality, but it never can be this reality itself. Can it? - less tagged:   concepts   reality   connectedness   ever-unfolding   strategy   marketing    permalink  read: 3322  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen

Is matter what matters? by Andre Platteel , August 25th

‘We are living in a material world’, Madonna sang in the beginning of her career - and she was a material girl. The world we experience is a world of matter: objects surround us and because we ourselves are used to identify strongly with our bodies think we consist out of matter. Our habit of thinking is seeing reality in matter. Due to this strong identification with matter our (western) culture has, until now, been called a consumer society: we define others, the world and ourselves in terms of what we consume, what we posses. The seductive engine of our western society, the marketing industry, has been quite successful in communicating ‘Consume and be happy’, making us believe that as long as we buy we will enter a world in which all our problems will dissolve. We will become more beautiful, more friendly, more sexy, more safe, more skilled, more successful, and maybe even more human. Believing that we ourselves are not perfect – how can we believe different, being surrounded by the media emphasizing only that what we supposedly lack – we are willing to embrace the marketing promise. We are trying to become whole by embracing something outside of ourselves, wishing to be welcomed in a perfect world. But once matter has been consumed we notice that the better worlds been promised through matter are not part of the consumption. + more ‘We are living in a material world’, Madonna sang in the beginning of her career - and she was a material girl. The world we experience is a world of matter: objects surround us and because we ourselves are used to identify strongly with our bodies think we consist out of matter. Our habit of thinking is seeing reality in matter. Due to this strong identification with matter our (western) culture has, until now, been called a consumer society: we define others, the world and ourselves in terms of what we consume, what we posses. The seductive engine of our western society, the marketing industry, has been quite successful in communicating ‘Consume and be happy’, making us believe that as long as we buy we will enter a world in which all our problems will dissolve. We will become more beautiful, more friendly, more sexy, more safe, more skilled, more successful, and maybe even more human. Believing that we ourselves are not perfect – how can we believe different, being surrounded by the media emphasizing only that what we supposedly lack – we are willing to embrace the marketing promise. We are trying to become whole by embracing something outside of ourselves, wishing to be welcomed in a perfect world. But once matter has been consumed we notice that the better worlds been promised through matter are not part of the consumption. Of course, marketing knows this and reacts with different strategies. New products are invented creating a chain of ‘product innovations’ almost every half a year. ‘You were not embraced in perfectness? Try this one, a new invention that is guaranteed to work.’ Consumers are becoming aware of the fact that the product, the matter, is becoming less a thing that matters. A recent MIT-study showed that the more we consume the unhappier we become. We are becoming conscious of the fact that life is not about having but about being. Being more conscious. Thinking that seduction can only work from a position of ‘needing something that is missing’, marketing has introduced a new strategy in making consumers insecure: the conceptual brand. It is not now the product but the idea connected to the product that matters. The brand idea is connected to a single minded meaning, directed by and through the maketeer. However, marketers forget that from the perspective of ‘I’ we all have our specific needs and wants which can never be captured in one unambiguous idea. If marketers think idea makes matter, why not embrace the ideas of consumers in order to make the matter matter to them? And why not choose an other source for the idea than fear to spark temptation? When do marketers see that we –all of us - are already whole, that nothing is lacking and that matter can never be the divine? The promise of becoming whole through consumption (being it an idea or product) is misleading, as wholeness is already reality for each and every one of us. Right now. We do not need anything outside ourselves to become complete: as ourselves we are just perfect. In truly understanding that we are al already whole a new (marketing)play could be introduced: ‘consuming’ not based on fear but based on celebrating life. How interesting this play would be: for both ‘consumers’ and ‘producers’. - less tagged:   marketing   communications   co-creation   MIT   Madonna    permalink  read: 2106  print  forward  comments: 0  add comment      name:

more articles in the Archive

.clients  .coaching  .contact  .publications  .strategy  Advaita  AlexvanWarmerdam  aliveness  Allen  animals  Anschauen  Antonioni  Aronofsky  arrogance  art  attention  authetic  awareness  Babel  balance  beauty  Bechstein  Beloved  Berber  beyond  BigMind  BigSur  bird  blackhole  blindness  blood  Body  Bohm  books  borders  Borges  brands  brightnes  brightness  BruceLee  business  Butterfly  carpet  Cartesian  CEO  change  child  Chinese  circle  Clueless  co-creation  colours  communications  community  concepts  condor  confusion  connectedness  consciousness  consuming  Coppola  creation  crocuses  Curse  dancing  darkness  Death  decadence  decay  desert  desire  dialogue  DiegoMaradona  difference  DirtyDancing  disorientation  doubt  dream  Duchamps  Dunaway  eagle  earth  endless  erotic  Esalen  ever-unfolding  everything  Evil  evolution  experience  faith  falling  family  father  fear  feeding  feeling  fighting  film  fire  flame  flow  flower  flowers  fluid  foam  form  fragment  freedom  friend  Gangaji  God  Goethe  goodness  gravity  grip  ground  Groundhogday  grounding  guilty  Gypsy  heart  hearth  heaven  Hero  holy  home  horizon  house  Hungary  hypocrisy  ignorance  image  images  imagination  India  innocence  intimacy  inviting  irony  Japan  Jarrett  Jewison  judgement  KarlBlossfeldt  Knowing  language  laughter  leaves  lie  life  light  Linklater  love  Lynch  lyrics  Madonna  Magic  Manhattan  MarcForster  marketing  martial-art  MartinParr  master  matter  McLuhan  McQueen  meadow  media  meditation  memories  memory  merketing  Merleau-Ponty  MET  mind  MIT  Moma  Monet  Montauk  moon  mortal  mother  mountain  mountains  movement  Murakami  Muslim  natural  Nazis  Newton  NewYork  Nolita  nothing  Olive  oneness  opinion  opposites  otherness  painters  painting  Paris  passion  patterns  phenomena  philosophy  photographer  physiology  Pirandello  plane  playing  Pollock  pornographic  power  promise  punishment  reality  red  repetition  resistance  river  Romania  roses  sadness  seduction  self-consciousness  Serra  shadow  Shakespeare  shame  Shapiro  silence  silk  singing  sky  Slacker  slopes  SmallMind  snow  SoHo  sorry  space  spaciousness  spirit  spiritual  spirituality  Spring  stars  stone  stories  StrangerthanFiction  strategy  stress  sun  swan  swordsman  T'aiChi  TallbergForum  tears  thinking  time  totalitarian  totality  travel  trees  TV-series  understanding  uniqueness  unity  untrue  Ursus  utopia  virginity  vitality  voices  Waiter  warrior  water  wholeness  wind  wing  Wing-Chun  wolf  WoodyAllen  youth  Zelig  Zen 

 objectevent

Advaita  AlexvanWarmerdam  aliveness  Allen  animals  Anschauen  Antonioni  Aronofsky  arrogance  art  attention  authetic  awareness  Babel  balance  beauty  Bechstein  Beloved  Berber  beyond  BigMind  BigSur  bird  blackhole  blindness  blood  Body  Bohm  books  borders  Borges  brands  brightnes  brightness  BruceLee  business  Butterfly  carpet  Cartesian  CEO  change  child  Chinese  circle  Clueless  co-creation  colours  communications  community  concepts  condor  confusion  connectedness  consciousness  consuming  Coppola  creation  crocuses  Curse  dancing  darkness  Death  decadence  decay  desert  desire  dialogue  DiegoMaradona  difference  DirtyDancing  disorientation  doubt  dream  Duchamps  Dunaway  eagle  earth  endless  erotic  Esalen  ever-unfolding  everything  Evil  evolution  experience  faith  falling  family  father  fear  feeding  feeling  fighting  film  fire  flame  flow  flower  flowers  fluid  foam  form  fragment  freedom  friend  Gangaji  God  Goethe  goodness  gravity  grip  ground  Groundhogday  grounding  guilty  Gypsy  heart  hearth  heaven  Hero  holy  home  horizon  house  Hungary  hypocrisy  ignorance  image  images  imagination  India  innocence  intimacy  inviting  irony  Japan  Jarrett  Jewison  judgement  KarlBlossfeldt  Knowing  language  laughter  leaves  lie  life  light  Linklater  love  Lynch  lyrics  Madonna  Magic  Manhattan  MarcForster  marketing  martial-art  MartinParr  master  matter  McLuhan  McQueen  meadow  media  meditation  memories  memory  merketing  Merleau-Ponty  MET  mind  MIT  Moma  Monet  Montauk  moon  mortal  mother  mountain  mountains  movement  Murakami  Muslim  natural  Nazis  Newton  NewYork  Nolita  nothing  Olive  oneness  opinion  opposites  otherness  painters  painting  Paris  passion  patterns  phenomena  philosophy  photographer  physiology  Pirandello  plane  playing  Pollock  pornographic  power  promise  punishment  reality  red  repetition  resistance  river  Romania  roses  sadness  seduction  self-consciousness  Serra  shadow  Shakespeare  shame  Shapiro  silence  silk  singing  sky  Slacker  slopes  SmallMind  snow  SoHo  sorry  space  spaciousness  spirit  spiritual  spirituality  Spring  stars  stone  stories  StrangerthanFiction  strategy  stress  sun  swan  swordsman  T'aiChi  TallbergForum  tears  thinking  time  totalitarian  totality  travel  trees  TV-series  understanding  uniqueness  unity  untrue  Ursus  utopia  virginity  vitality  voices  Waiter  warrior  water  wholeness  wind  wing  Wing-Chun  wolf  WoodyAllen  youth  Zelig  Zen 

2010	June May April
2009	June May April March January
2008	December October September August May April March February January
2007	December November October September August

contentpeople

June, 2010 Dutch Political Leaders Receive book Our World		May, 2010 Resistance Decadence New Book: Our World		April, 2010 Arrogance Naivety Ignorance		June, 2009 Mother of all memories
May, 2009 Come again, and again, and again		April, 2009 The Wolf		March, 2009 The three voices		January, 2009 Born to adore This Dancing with the Beloved
December, 2008 Listen carefully		October, 2008 A fragment of a circle God’s Gods You, me and everything else		September, 2008 Man with powers		August, 2008 The hidden promise Crazy for love
May, 2008 Dr. Feelgood What’s the limit of love		April, 2008 Spring Snow will fall The Cleaner		March, 2008 Motherless Child What I am made of Falling upwards Northern Lights		February, 2008 Glass-made-mind The outer layer of the mind Growing younger On Holy Ground
January, 2008 Watch for the wind to blow How is Diego Maradona doing? What are we guilty off? Everything is what is besides language The eagle and the condor flying together In the heart of Otherness		December, 2007 The man who loved too much The dark brightness The windmills of our mind To make two mountains one, gone Bigger than the stars		November, 2007 Act of passion Making love Life has no meaning Where the heart is Oneness is never the same		October, 2007 Mind blowing Becoming authentic Coloured Mind Hide and Seek Culture of fear The man on the bench The Swordsman
September, 2007 What is thinking? World happening Unity in diversity Smell no evil Going in all directions without beginning or end Alternative routes Superheroes don’t age No place like Utopia? Fog		August, 2007 The Wholeness of being Spirit through matter Looking in the mirror A new heart Is matter what matters? World of opinions. Spaciousness for a flower to grow