Conflict Resolution - An Interview With Ken Cloke

Ken Cloke, one of the world's leading experts in conflict resolution shares his timeless wisdom. He describes the transformative power of conflicts, the importance of maintaining complexity, and how meditative practices can promote conflict resolution.

Transcript

Thank you for joining me tonight can or morning your,

Your time.

I have a lot of questions for you.

As one of the most experienced experts in conflict resolution that are on our planet I think right now.

So my first question is a very personal question,

And it is what motivated you to work in the domain of conflict resolution in the first place.

Let's see there are several answers.

I've been in different parts of my life.

Personally,

I went through a really horrible divorce.

That was very conflicted and I just felt immediately there has to be some other way of doing this professionally.

I was a judge.

And I was required to make decisions on the basis of something that is very elusive Lee referred to as justice.

But I had no idea really what that was,

And it didn't feel like what I was doing.

Was that just also I had been very involved politically during the 1960s in all the various movements for social change that took place at that time.

I was in the civil rights movement in the working in the south and in the north.

And I experienced enormous amounts of conflict.

In fact,

You could even say that I was a professional conflict creator.

Because that's what we did in order to try to bring about social change.

And yet,

There was clearly a limit on what could be done.

And if you wanted to reach people's hearts and minds.

You couldn't just shout at them.

It isn't going to work.

But the last piece was really interesting.

I don't know if you know about the American television program.

It's a television program involving a judge who makes decisions involving people who come through small claims court,

Very small cases,

But it's on television and I was selected to be the first judge on people's court.

And without really knowing what I was doing.

I mediated.

I made a case in the pilot,

And they fired me because they wanted someone to lose in order to interview them.

And so these were all things that were happening.

As a judge I was assigned to settle cases and I found that I was good at it and I enjoyed it.

And then I went to a free lecture on mediation,

Which was the very first program that was set up in Los Angeles,

Involving neighborhood community mediation.

And in five minutes,

Two minutes,

Really,

I knew my life had changed.

And so I began working in mediation and it really spoke to me on all of those levels.

As you know,

Speak to so many people and change their lives.

Yes.

Yes.

Thank you.

Yeah.

My next question is what is the role of emotions in conflicts and in their resolution.

The role of emotions is so deep and so profound,

It's difficult even to speak about it.

Wittgenstein said that in quotes,

Every word has an emotional tone.

And I believe this to be the case.

But also,

I think it is quite clear from a mediation perspective that every conflict has an emotional component.

So if we ask the question,

Can you have two or more people together and not have a conflict.

The answer is yes.

But if you have two or more people and a disagreement.

You still don't have a conflict.

You have a disagreement.

This agreement turns into a conflict in the presence of what we think of as intense negative emotion.

But now what we have to do is we have to redefine what emotion is.

So the difficulty is we think of emotions as very large.

But the reality is that they are also very,

Very small.

So each of us today chose the clothes we were going to wear.

How did we make that choice?

And the answer is we chose the clothes we like.

So we had an emotional experience getting dressed this morning.

It wasn't a very deep or profound or intense one,

But it was very real.

And so at a very subtle level,

Lots and lots of emotions get triggered whenever we are in conflict.

In the first place,

What happens is there is a perceived threat from someone who is outside of us and perhaps antagonistic towards us.

And this triggers a set of responses within the brain that you are much more familiar with than I am.

But they're very profound and they're very quick.

And they have a very subtle and at the same time,

Very obvious consequences in relationship to conflict.

But now we need to move in a different direction and ask a somewhat different question.

If we ask the question,

Where exactly are conflicts located?

We will come up with a series of answers.

One,

They are located internally inside of us.

Here they are neurophysiological and need to be addressed using a set of techniques that are going to be different from the other ways and locations that conflict manifests itself.

A second place that conflicts exist is relationally and between us.

And a third place that they exist is systemically,

Contextually,

Environmentally around us.

So they are within us,

They are between us,

And they are around us.

And we need to think of what we do in conflict in each of those locations.

But each of those has a somewhat different emotional texture,

Nuance,

Which we don't fully understand.

And there's a fundamental location that is different from each of those three because it's not specific.

It's not located in some place that you could identify very clearly.

But I think of this as the algorithm that is responsible for a large number of our conflict responses,

And it is essentially the idea of the zero-sum game.

The perception that there is a hierarchy,

A pecking order,

And that our job is to arrange our environment and our relationships in such a way as to have as few people as possible above us,

And as many as possible equal to or below us.

And as long as that's the assumption,

Then a lot of what happens in conflict happens automatically.

But if we shift that assumption,

Which is what mediation is really about,

Trying to create questions for which there is not a single correct answer.

Looking at interests,

Orienting,

And here's my way of phrasing it,

And you may have a better way of phrasing it,

But my phraseology is to orient our emotions and turn them in the direction of problem solving.

Because what emotions fundamentally are is an approach to solving problems.

It's a source of information about the nature of our problems,

Which can then allow us to think more clearly and successfully about what we're going to do about them.

And here I find it useful to use some of the language developed by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow,

System 1 and System 2.

And emotions in this scheme,

Allow us to compress information to respond more quickly to data as it comes in.

To overcome some of the,

How would I say this,

The ways we get stuck and hypnotized by things that happen to us,

And allow us instead to act more decisively.

So this is one way of saying it.

What it basically says is that emotions are absolutely central to everything that happens in conflict,

And yet virtually all of our mediations take place at a mental,

Intellectual,

Abstract,

Symbolic,

Sort of level where we analyze issues.

We identify what the problem is.

But underneath that is a whole world,

Which is vastly more complex than what we imagine.

And that's the world that I think mediators have to operate in,

And the world that we need information about from science.

So,

In other words,

What you're trying to promote is a sense of feeling connected,

Of benevolence between the parties,

Something like this?

Yes,

And the purpose of defining the locations is to say that one piece is the relational piece,

Which is how people communicate what they are experiencing emotionally to one another in ways that can be heard and acknowledged and responded to.

But deeper than that is what we feel ourselves.

And that emotional response that we have to others can influence how we feel inside ourselves,

And vice versa.

But if we do that and we don't address any of the environmental or systemic elements that give rise to conflicts,

We will end up experiencing those emotions and not understand why we're experiencing them.

My way of saying this is the system doesn't show up for the mediation.

It's in the background.

And when we are fired from a job,

We are angry at the person who fired us without realizing that there may be a recession at work,

And we were just one of many who could be fired.

That doesn't help us.

Well,

Yes and no,

I guess it makes it less personal and then less emotional,

Right?

But what I mean is,

I didn't say that quite correctly,

What it means is that we will get stuck in our emotions if we don't have some sense of the fact that there is an environment that is triggering those emotions,

And it's not necessarily somebody's fault that we're feeling badly.

But that's how we feel about it.

And so that brings me maybe to a question that I wanted to ask later but that I'll ask now.

What for you are the key similarities and the key differences between the different levels between intra-individual conflict,

Interpersonal conflict,

Maybe also intergroup conflict,

And the kind of systemic or structural issues or oppressions that we deal with?

Very nice,

Very nice question.

There are multiple levels that I think we need to look at.

In the first place,

Conflict requires that there be two.

Two or more parts of oneself.

Two or more individuals working together.

And as soon as you have two,

And those two are different from one another,

You have the beginning of complexity.

And there is a science of complexity.

And the difficulty is,

There's a wonderful writer whose name is Ilya Prigogine,

Who won the Nobel Prize for,

I'm not sure if it was in biology,

Whatever,

Some subject,

He wrote a book called Order Out of Chaos.

And it's a book,

The book is about what are called dissipative systems.

Systems that are complex and are moving into a phase transition,

For example from water to ice,

Or from water to steam.

And what he discovered is several things.

First of all,

That the more rigid a system is the more likely it is to collapse under pressure.

And secondly,

That in the period of transition from one state to another,

Systems arise automatically within whatever that structure is,

That are designed to facilitate the transition.

Now here if we think about this for a moment,

And we take a look back at conflict in the very beginning,

We can identify two groups of people who do not experience conflicts as examples.

One,

There are no three year olds who experience conflicts over romantic love.

Because they're not ready yet.

And number two,

There are no 60 year olds,

We hope,

Who are experiencing conflict with their parents over curfew.

Why?

Because they have already solved that problem.

So who gets conflicts?

And the answer is people who are in the transition from it not being a problem for them to the place where they have the skills to be able to handle it.

In other words,

Every conflict takes place at a crossroads,

Defined on the one hand by a problem we're now required to solve.

And on the other hand by the fact that we do not yet have the skills we need in order to solve it.

So,

I think that this happens personally,

Relationally,

And systemically.

And it's a little bit different in each of those cases because the more you go up,

The more complex the problem is.

So there's complexity internally.

But now if we take two people who have complex internalities,

Internal lives,

And put them together,

You've got exponentially more complexity.

And now if you put them into an environment in which there are not just two people but 10,

100,

150,

2000,

We have something even more difficult.

I don't know if you know about Dunbar's number.

Robin Dunbar is a professor in England who has come up with this idea that you can only have 150 friendships at a time the human brain can't handle any more than that,

Which is interesting.

And he shows various levels,

You know,

Of there's what happens between two people,

What happens with five people.

Maybe you have an outer circle of 10 friends,

Etc.

So,

The levels of intimacy began to decline.

But what he doesn't say is what do we do as a result.

And this is the part that's interesting to me,

Because what we do as a result,

I think,

In the first place,

Is we stereotype,

Meaning we group people together.

For simplicity purposes.

This I think is an emotional response to overload.

And the second thing that happens in a system is that it simply becomes impossible to have a certain level of conversation.

Unless you do what every facilitator of large group mediations does.

We call I call them large group multi stakeholder consensus building projects.

And what we do is automatically break people down into small groups,

Put them into groups of five to seven,

And automatically,

The whole conversation will shift,

Because people can now have an intimate emotionally intelligent conversation with each other,

That they couldn't have in a large group.

So,

Systems require that,

But they also require a kind of,

Let's see how do I say this.

Well,

There's a nice way of saying it.

There's a man who's a French writer whose name is Henri-Frederique Amiel.

I don't know if you have heard of him.

And here I'll give you a quote.

He says,

Quote,

Our systems,

Perhaps,

Are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults.

A gigantic scaffolding,

Whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

Isn't that nice.

Very,

Very interesting idea.

And if we think that that sin is the sin of conflict,

Or the sins that grow out of conflict.

Now we have a kind of explanation for a large number of systems.

Here's my way of saying this.

Every organization,

Every institution is a conflict resolution project.

Everyone,

Because its goal is to bring people together who are complex and unite them in a single conversation in a single goal,

A single purpose.

How do you do that,

You have to be able to somehow reduce the level of conflict between them.

And this gives mediators,

An opportunity to say,

Okay,

Good.

How well are you doing in that project.

Are you being successful.

Could you be more successful.

How would that possibly take place.

Great.

So my learnings are,

And this is one thing that I already remember from you and that I keep returning to so whenever I'm in a conflict,

I know this is a great opportunity for growth.

And the other thing is like the more complex systems get the more important it is to break it down so that we are at a level where we can perceive the complexity of each other,

But we don't fall into the stereotypical trap,

Or the trap of stereotypes.

And the other one is that that systems cover our sins and I think I have to think about it a bit more.

But in a way.

Yeah,

Our sins or our desires of related.

Yeah,

I'll think about this one.

Yeah,

It takes some thinking about.

Very good.

There's a very simple yes go ahead.

No,

Go ahead.

There's a very simple way of thinking about the complexity.

And my way of doing this is to say that in any group of people that I'm speaking to.

I will say to them there are three orders or categories of questions that I can ask everyone in this group.

Number one,

Who is the oldest person in this group,

Who's the youngest,

Who's the tallest,

Who's the shortest,

Who lives the closest to Paris,

Who lives the furthest away.

And there's a single correct answer for everyone.

Category two.

How old are you,

How tall are you,

Where do you live.

And now there's a single correct answer for each person.

Category three.

What issues are you facing at whatever age you are at.

What is your height mean to you.

What did it mean to you when you were growing up.

What do you love about where you live.

What do you not love about where you live.

And notice now there are multiple correct answers for everyone.

But in order to get to those answers we have to have an ability to accept complexity and ambiguity and nuance and subtlety.

And this requires a level of intelligence that is very different from the one that is encouraged and promoted very broadly in many cultures around the world.

And as you said earlier,

A level of openness and receptivity and a lower level of stress that allows us to perceive this complexity right.

Yeah.

Okay,

Um,

I have another question that is also maybe personal maybe not.

So I know you have been meditating for a long time and that you bridge meditation and conflict resolution and could you talk about the ways that you bring the meditation to your work as a mediator.

Yes,

Thank you very much.

Well,

As you indicated,

When we were chatting before the call started I've written a short little piece,

Which is about my title for it now is ordinary ecstasy.

It's about mediation and meditation.

And I have been meditating now for over 30 years,

Well over that an hour a day,

Every day.

And it would be very difficult for me to do this work if I didn't do that.

If I didn't have that practice.

What does it do for me.

In the first place,

What it does is to put me in touch with.

What I think of is the fundamental activity of meditation,

Which is the moment by moment experience of the flow of life energy inside and around me,

Or to go back to what I was saying before,

Inside between and around us.

And that moment by moment experience of the flow of life energy allows me to feel inside myself at a subtle level when something has shifted.

When something isn't quite on solid ground.

When it feels shaky.

Like there's something underneath it.

And that,

Together with experience has led me to jump in to a conversation that I have no idea what is going to happen in.

And this is another piece of meditation.

I think something that meditation helps with is the recognition that you can't possibly know what is about to happen next.

There's a beautiful line from Pablo Neruda,

Who says,

Every casual encounter is an appointment.

And if that's the case,

Who made this appointment.

What's it for what are we here to do what I like,

I like to think of it in this way.

I want to listen to the people that I'm speaking to,

As though my life.

We're about to change as a result of what I'm about to hear.

And if I do that,

I show up in a way for the conversation that I otherwise don't.

In other words,

Our quality of presence is one that is enhanced by meditation,

Because we let go of the past,

And we let go of the future.

And we simply exist right now in the present.

And that is actually the place in which people are able to gain insight into the things that are troubling them.

And from the place of insight.

We are then able to direct our attention at whatever is most troublesome,

And that direction of attention is itself,

A kind of purification.

It is a kind of release.

This is difficult for people to understand and conflict.

They don't really necessarily see this.

But if I can help them feel it,

That's a little different.

There's another level in which meditation helps,

And that is at the level of empathy and compassion.

The ability to experience that life energy shifting when you are in conversation and relationship with someone allows you to feel inside yourself some little shift that takes place.

And that then becomes something I can ask a question about.

To me,

That's the beginning of empathy.

So I hope that helps.

There are some other places as well that I think meditation helps.

One of the things that happens in conflict is that people lose perspective.

And one of the reasons they come to see a mediator is to try to regain some sense of perspective about what is really true.

But they don't necessarily want to hear the mediator tell them,

This is what is true.

They want to experience it themselves.

And the best way of doing that,

The most effective way is by framing a question that invites them to look at what they are experiencing in some new way.

But in order for the question to work,

It has to come to the problem from the perspective of the person who has it.

And yet be informed by the perspective of someone who doesn't have it.

So again,

If we ask the question,

Where is the mediator located?

It is inside the conflict,

And at the same time outside of it.

And if you're just inside of it,

You'll be part of the problem and you won't have perspective.

And if you're just outside of it,

You'll have perspective,

But you won't understand intimately the nature of the problem.

And I think of this in a way,

This is going to sound a little strange,

As a kind of feminization of the process of dispute resolution.

Or if you will,

A kind of dismantling of one of the elements of patriarchy,

Which is the suppression of what we can think of as the underlying elements of empathy and compassion,

Which are a deep sense of caring for each other.

That's not particularly useful if you want to shoot someone.

So if your project is to gain control or to impose dominance,

Then you're not going to be that open to this kind of experience.

And yet,

And this is the systemic level,

It is one that is already deep inside of us.

It's one that we're born with.

It's one that we gain through interactions with our parents when we're very young,

That we practice and grow and develop in as we form relationships through life.

And it is probably the deepest and most profound aspect of meditation.

There's a famous exchange conversation that took place between,

Reportedly,

The Buddha and his disciple Ananda.

Ananda comes to the Buddha and says,

You know,

It seems to me as though at least half of this path is about love.

And the Buddha says,

No,

No,

Don't say that,

Ananda.

It's all about love.

So,

Ta-da!

This is the Buddha of love and care.

It's the Canon Buddha.

Beautiful.

Yeah,

It's the whole of the path.

I agree.

I agree.

Thank you.

Do you also,

When you do meditations,

Do you also use,

Or do you try to convey some of the content or practices of meditation to your parties?

One thing is that you use it yourself and then you yourself become more attuned to the complexity,

To the emotions that are present,

To the caring and that you can induce it in a rather implicit way,

But do you also explicitly work with aspects or contents or methods from meditation?

Yes,

Absolutely.

And in doing that,

It's important to understand the culture of the people that you are working with.

For example,

I worked in a religious hospital,

Resolving conflicts,

And every meeting they had began with a prayer.

And so I just converted that into every mediation began with a prayer.

And I asked each person to say a prayer for this conversation that we're about to have right now.

But then I thought,

And then I did a some work in Canada with First Nation people who are what we would call Native American,

Aboriginal,

Indian,

Whatever,

First Nation people in Canada,

And to help design a mediation program that was intertribal.

And we began by using what was called the peace pipe,

Passing the peace pipe from one person to another,

And sitting in silence and waiting for people's hearts to open and asking people to speak from their hearts.

And then I realized,

Well,

Wait a minute,

Why can't we do that in any mediation?

What are some questions that would allow us to begin by opening the heart space of people in conflict,

And then moving that and consolidating that and turning that into an agenda,

Into a set of ground rules,

If you will.

So here's an example of what I do in family disputes for questions,

Roughly.

Question one,

What words would you use to describe the kind of family you most want to have?

The kind of family,

You would love to have?

Now I've introduced most want and love into the question.

And then people will say,

I want a family that is caring.

I want a family that's respectful.

I want a family that's honest.

And now we know that the one who says,

I want a family that's respectful feels disrespected.

The one who wants a family that's caring feels uncared for.

One that wants a family that's honest feels lied to.

Now question number two.

Does anybody disagree with any of those words?

Nobody has ever disagreed.

So I say congratulations,

You've reached consensus.

And these are sometimes people who haven't spoken to each other for 15 years.

Question three.

Are each of you prepared right now in this conversation to begin living up to those words?

And now I'll say yes.

Question four,

Do each of us have permission to stop the conversation if we begin moving away from those words?

The answer is yes.

And now we can say,

For example,

How does this feel to you to start in this way?

I actually have a question about this because it is a process that I have been using today.

And it was effective to a degree,

But then I felt that the conversation would drift off again into a territory where maybe interruptions would become necessary and so on.

And I mean one thing is,

Of course,

You can remind people then but this kind of goes into the blaming and shaming direction which I would like to avoid,

Right?

So what are skillful ways to deal with it once,

Because we know that we are imperfect beings once these things move out of these,

Out of the consensus again?

So in the first place,

We have to see that people have been doing this for decades.

And to break that pattern isn't going to be as simple as simply asking a question and inviting them to answer in that way.

However,

By doing that,

What we have essentially done is to define a context of caring in which it is possible then to surface uncaring or shaming and blaming without having it completely overwhelm the caring.

It doesn't cancel what happened before,

Even though it may try to,

It's just different from,

And it's back into a more,

A deeper,

More powerful set of responses that again you know much better at a physiological level,

Neurophysiological level than I do.

But these are fight,

Flight,

Flee,

Fawn,

These kinds of responses.

And now,

What we want to do is to apply what we know about from neurophysiology to this problem.

This is one way of looking at it,

Which is,

Let's increase the supply of oxytocin.

Okay,

So how exactly do we do that?

Well,

One way of doing it is by trying to dig beneath the shaming and blaming and asking what is directly underneath it.

And underneath it is always some desire for the other person to behave differently towards me,

To care about me.

And it's possible then to say,

Do you feel uncared for?

Do you feel betrayed?

Do you feel disrespected?

And then it's possible and sometimes that's the right approach and sometimes it is totally the wrong approach.

So every one of these things can work in some cases and not in others.

And the answer is we don't,

And we can't accept by meditation and fine tuning our intuition,

That is our sense of empathy and compassion for other people,

We are able to get closer and closer in our approximation to what it is that they may in fact be feeling.

And in experience we get better and better at that,

But I don't think we're ever at 100%,

It's just not possible.

And therefore what we can do is to say,

For example,

Here are some interventions that might work.

Here's one of my favorites.

What question would you most like the other person to ask you right now?

What would you most like her to ask you?

See what he comes up with.

And would you be willing to answer that question?

And a second one would be,

What is something that you would most like to be acknowledged for or appreciated for by the other person?

Where does this come from?

It comes from a feeling in my part that if I were this person,

I would be feeling unappreciated.

And how important that would be to me.

And I can tell you,

As a mediator over maybe probably now tens of thousands of disputes.

People signal what they really want,

Subtly.

And if we were really listening to those signals,

We can figure out a close enough question to begin to move in the direction of what is going to open that conversation,

But it's a struggle and it doesn't always work.

And there are many,

Many other approaches that we can take as well.

Yeah,

Thanks.

Here's one actually I'll just What is one issue between the two of you that you are still holding on to that you haven't yet communicated to the other person.

And would you be willing to communicate that now.

Sometimes that's there,

It's bottled up.

But when you ask them to do it,

They will do it.

Or here's another one,

This one is bizarre,

Completely bizarre,

You wouldn't think that anyone would have an answer to this question.

Here's the question.

Even at the very beginning,

Before the conversation begins,

You can say,

After this conversation is over today,

You're going to be going home,

And you're going to be thinking about what we said here.

What are you going to wish that you had said,

Say it now.

Right.

So,

Those are all things that I think can really deepen the conversation,

And we have to assume that all we can do is invite people into a useful conversation.

We can't force them to go there.

If they can't go there,

It means the problem is way deeper than we had imagined.

Because everybody really wants to get there,

Everybody.

But for some people they can't,

Because it's incomplete.

And they don't know how to complete it.

Maybe a last question before we close.

With all your experience,

I would like to ask you for your vision.

So where should the field of conflict resolution,

As well as the scientific study of it,

Go in the next 20,

30,

40 years?

What are the big issues that we should tackle?

Wow,

Great one.

In the first place,

I would say that it is going to be essential for our survival as a species,

That we tackle the problem of political conflict.

So I've written a book,

Really now two books because of the one that I just finished this summer will be added to that one.

The first book is called Politics,

Dialogue,

And the Evolution of Democracy.

And the second one is called Mediation in a Time of Crisis.

And some of these articles are on my website,

Or you can find them at mediate.

Com.

And basically,

What we have to do is to understand that political conflict is conflict.

And that we can work backwards from conflict resolution to a reconsideration of what politics actually is.

And if we do that,

We will discover in Aristotle,

The basic idea that politics is simply,

In quotes,

A search for the highest common good.

That was Aristotle's definition.

Great,

Except it doesn't predict the kind of politics we have.

So what do we do now?

Well,

Aristotle actually tells us indirectly,

Not by telling us but by saying something.

And what he says is,

Of course,

This doesn't apply to women,

Children,

Slaves,

And barbarians.

And by barbarians,

Of course,

He means foreigners,

Immigrants.

And this,

Of course,

Is 80% of the population of Athens,

At least.

So now we have a tiny minority who have democracy.

And why?

Because if you are a slave owner,

And slaves have democracy,

Slavery is over.

And if you are a man,

And hopefully in charge of property and,

You know,

Hoping to be in charge of decisions that influence what happens with your property and make decisions in your home,

You don't want women to have that right either,

Etc.

So,

The goal then is one of domination.

And we can now see that there are two projects in democracy.

One is social problem solving,

Which can be done in an interest based way.

And the second is domination.

If you want to eliminate domination you require democracy,

Because,

And an extension of democracy,

And many of the battles over history over the last several thousand years have been over the extension of democracy to women,

To blacks,

Ordinary people,

People without property,

Etc.

So that's the first piece.

The second piece is we require a much much more sophisticated neuro physiological understanding of emotion,

And of what happens in conflict and what works and what doesn't work.

And we need to be able to find to this we need the human connectome.

We need the blue brain project.

We need all of the various work that is being done in neuro physiology today that is just brilliant.

And I read about this all the time.

We need to address the hard problem of consciousness,

And to figure out what exactly this is and how exactly it works.

And as a part of that.

And you can even add in virtual reality.

But what is quite clear is that maybe Ray Kurzweil didn't have it quite correct in his book about the singularity is near,

But we are rapidly increasing the informational capacity through quantum computing,

And through artificial intelligence for systems like alpha go alpha go zero alpha zero that have successfully now way way bypassed human capacity to play games like go or chess or whatever.

And it is possible to do this not by teaching artificial intelligence,

How to play the game,

But just giving it a set of rules and asking it to play itself.

And there's a man who you may whose work you may know about his name is Julia tononi,

Who's in Ohio.

And he's got an idea about something called fee which is about,

You know,

Sort of like the relationship between consciousness and complexity.

And I know that there's a lot of uncertainty about this and lack of clarity about whether he's right or not,

But I think that we are wrapped with rapidly approaching a point where we may find out in today's I get online.

I'm a scientist from England.

In today's example there is a newsletter.

There's a little piece about little brain tissue tissues that are grown in a laboratory that have now lived for over a year,

And developed a level of complexity that have developed wave functions.

So what is the difference between alpha and theta,

And all of the various waveforms and brain formation in consciousness.

And in my view,

I experience emotions as a kind of waveform.

That's how I experienced them I feel them as a wave with amplitude and frequency.

There's a difference between the amplitude and frequency of fear,

And that of anger.

And if that's the case,

Then it is also possible to cancel that wave by creating an equal and opposite wave.

And so now we have a kind of explanation of something that may be possible.

Am I making this up.

I have no idea,

But I would like to know,

And I think that science is getting to a point where it is capable of giving an answer to some of those questions.

Thank you so much Ken for taking the time.

Oh,

And for sharing your wisdom.

It's amazing things.

One little piece to just add to this.

I don't know if you've heard of Martin Reese,

He's the was the Royal astronomer for England.

He said that there are three great frontiers in science.

The very big,

The very small,

And the very complex.

And I think we need to look at all of those questions consciousness is a very big one,

Very small one is the neuro physiological responses.

And also this is very complex stuff.

And to really plunge into that complexity and describe it.

And as simple a terms as possible,

But no simpler as Einstein said,

It would be a great contribution to all the work that we are doing.

And what piece of work that has to be done,

I think,

Reviews

Loved hearing about the impact of meditation on mediation - building presence and opening up intuition. Also very interesting to hear some of Ken Cloke's interventions and the intention that lies beneath them. Insightful and thought provoking. Thank you 🙏🏼

This had some great insights into conflict resolution. Thank you!

Interesting. Good ideas. More examples would make the ideas more concrete.

Wonderful to find such thought provoking and rich content on such an important topic. Thank you for bringing Ken’s wisdom to me. As a mediator myself, it resonated with me deeply.

Thank you for this potent interview. It provides rich fodder for reflection and contemplation. Sending good wishes with gratitude.

He offers so many poignant techniques for resolving conflicts. Thank you for the interview.

Thank you very interesting ✨