I'm currently reading a very interesting book — "I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't): Telling the Truth About Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power", by TEDster Brene Brown. The book's core themes are the causes and connections between shame, courage, empathy and compassion.

One of the sub-themes Brown talks about is the difference between empathy (understanding) and sympathy (pity). Instantly I got thinking about the astounding amount of sympathy or pity people display about the experience of disability.

Brown says sympathy conveys the idea that you could not possibly understand someone's experience, while also implying that you are glad you cannot. "In most cases, when we give sympathy we do not reach across to understand the world as others see it," she writes. "Inherent in sympathy is, 'I don't understand your world, but from this view things look pretty bad.'"

I love the idea of entropy, explained eloquently by the BBC's Dr Brian Cox.  According to Wikipedia, "In statistical mechanics, entropy is a measure of the number of ways in which a system may be arranged, often taken to be a measure of "disorder" (the higher the entropy, the higher the disorder)." 

Watch this video and then let's consider entropy from a social change perspective.

Hello, it's 2012 - hope you had a great break. So, are you ready for change?

Not cataclysmic, apocalyptic, chronomatic, revelational change.

I mean subtle, gentle, influential and revolutionary change. Like this:

Finally, let me reveal my own morphic theory...and a simple truth.

Controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake believes that traditions, customs and rituals are maintained throughout history and embedded in societal lore and cultures through a process of what he calls morphic resonance.  At the heart of this well-debated school of thought is the concept that energy is transferred within and between fields containing evolutionary memory that exist around us.

Sheldrake points out that, in order for rituals to have a "deliberate and conscious evocation of memory, right back to the first act...ritual acts must be performed with the correct movements, gestures, words, and music throughout the world."

So a couple of weeks ago I bought a Kindle. I love it, not just because of the tech factor but also because holding books and turning pages are a hassle for me. I just put reading off. So I've read more books in two weeks than I have in a year almost.

But people come and sit in my lounge/office and look at my bookshelf. We talk about common books and it lets people know what I'm reading. Sometimes they even take a book to read. Not to mention it looks good aesthetically.

It occurs to me that, in five years time though, people will be looking at books I read five years ago. My current reading collection will be hidden in my Kindle.

Am at a bit of a loss for inspiration to blog today so I thought I'd take the liberty of sharing an email I received this morning:

"I saw you at the LATE at the Museum a while back. Your ideas about decay have been incredibly important and meaningful to me, and I have thought about them and reconsidered my own life in terms of decay and what can come from it. I find them useful on an almost daily basis, and have talked about them with others.

"Thank you very, very much."

Last Friday I introduced Rupert Sheldrake and his theory of morphic resonance. To recap, Sheldrake believes that all living things are made up of and surrounded by energy fields that create, in essence, an evolutionary history or memory for different species of plants, animals and, indeed, human beings. The transfer of energy within and between these fields, which Sheldrake terms morphic resonance, can be used to explain everything from how an acorn "knows how to" create an oak tree, to how a human being develops from a single cell into the form we recognise as a person.

Sheldrake believes social and cultural behaviour to be influenced - if not controlled - by morphic fields and morphic resonance. He uses the analogy of a hive of bees or nest of termites, which are "like a giant organism, and the insects inside it are like cells in a super organism...The hive or nest functions and responds as a unified whole", even though made up of thousands of individual insects.

An American researcher, Wayne Potts, showed that the rate of movement between dunlins (small wading birds) in a flock-banking manoeuvre (and that's not depositing a cheque or withdrawing cash) - which he termed the "manoeuvre wave" - was 60 to 80 milliseconds faster than their ability to respond individually to stimuli. It was "much faster than could be explained by any simple system of visual cuing and response to stimuli," says Sheldrake. Is the Mexican wave possible just because people are watching to see when it's their turn, or is each person responding as one small part of a group movement?

A few years ago I had a column in express, NZ's gay rag. Three of the columns explored the notion of morphic resonance and how it relates to social change. I thought I'd repeat these over the next three Fridays.

The theory of morphic resonance was developed by biologist Rupert Sheldrake and is a concept of collective memory, similar to Jung's collective unconscious. In a nutshell, morphic resonance challenges, amongst other things, the traditional view of evolution.

Sheldrake and others before him suggest that laws of nature are more like habits. As such laws have changed throughout the course of time. If the universe has habits, then the whole of life, says Sheldrake,"[involves] inherent unconscious memory; habits, the instincts of animals, the way in which embryos develop, all [reflect] a basic principle of inherent memory within life."

How changes to New Zealand society can be traced by considering the current place of those who were once on the margins.

Russell Brown chaired a session recently which involved me; journalist and author David Cohen; Ella Henry, an academic and former human rights commissioner; and Jacinda Ardern, the Labour Party's Youth Affairs spokesperson.

Last night's TV3 Campbell Live leaders debate between John Key and Phil Goff was yet another display of adolescent bravado, reminiscent of a high school debate. The moot: That I am better than you.

School bully Key, smug about getting A's in accounting and used to winning, openly sulked when Goff, not as natually gifted at the subject, showed that he'd knuckled down and done his homework. Key sulked and scowled openly when Goff unexpectedly rebuffed his right-wing economic arguments.

Goff, the nerdy guy that hangs out with the girls because he gets teased by the boys for having feelings, smirked when he realised he'd remembered the stuff right. I imagine he went off set to giggle in delight with his girlfriends at his accidental cleverness.