What happens in the ensemble work is that in a cooperative work, the power of communication in being with each other in acceptance and "yes, and"-ing each other, is that you as an individual start to believe in yourself because you begin to see yourself in the others' eyes. Your ensemble, your group, your team, your committee, is the one that's believing in you and you pull it together to do it for them. You know, it's simply recognizing you're not alone. I'm way out in theory here; it's the study of what the power is, the power in improvisation and why it changes lives.... I'm crazy about it, and that's why I've dedicated my life to the study of it. The power is love, if you want to know the truth. It's love and unconditional acceptance. You put yourself in a place of support, unconditional acceptance and love for who you are, the way you are and your uniqueness, and what you do is grow. You surround yourself with people who are truly interested in you and listen to you, and you will grow. And it doesn't take much to start advancing you, it doesn't take much of that support, it doesn't take much of that love and that care and you can do it. You can play act with people. You can be in a state of play together.
Martin de Maat
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The beginning of this work is just how to get people to remember how to play, to be in play. Once you're in play, you're in the moment. You're not judgmental, you're enjoying each other, you're accepting of everything that goes on; you're trusting yourself and just doing the game as best as you can. Your critical mind is gone, your analytical mind is not involved. Really, it's just the flow that goes on between human beings, the group the power of the ensemble.
As with any ensemble, it is the team effort or the group effort that makes the individual grow or look good. That's what the center of this work is all about, what these games and exercises are all about . . . breaking down barriers between people, empowering the individual to believe in their own associations and ideas, uncovering the courage to create, the courage to communicate.Martin de Maat
absolute faith, the acceptance of being accepted. Of course, in the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. But there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the "power of acceptance". To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be.
Paul Tillich
"Information" in most, if not all, of its connotations seems to rest upon the notion of selective power. The Shannon theory regards the information source, in emitting the signals (signs), as exerting a selective power upon the ensemble of messages. In the Carnap-Bar-Hillel semantic theory, the information content of statements relates to the selective power they exert upon ensembles of states. Again, at its pragmatic level, in true communicative situations [...] a source of information has a certain value to a recipient, where "value" may be regarded as a "selective power." Gabor, for example, observes that what people value in a source of information (i.e., what they are prepared to pay for) depends upon its exclusiveness and prediction power; he cites instances of a newspaper editor hoping for a "scoop" and a racegoer receiving information from a tipster. "Exclusiveness" here implies the selecting of that one particular recipient out of the population, while the "prediction" value of information rests upon the power it gives to the recipient to select his future action, out of the whole range of prior uncertainty as to what action to take. Again, signs have the power to select responses in people, such responses depending upon a totality of conditions. Human communication channels consist of individuals in conversation, or in various forms of social intercourse. Each individual and each conversation is unique; different people react to signs in different ways, depending each upon their own past experiences and upon the environment at the time. It is such variations, such differences, which gives rise to the principal problems in the study of human communication. (p. 244-5)
Colin Cherry
The significant point is that people unfit for freedom — who cannot do much with it — are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have-not" type of self. If Hitler had had the talents and the temperament of a genuine artist, if Stalin had had the capacity to become a first-rate theoretician, if Napoleon had had the makings of a great poet or philosopher they would hardly have developed the all-consuming lust for absolute power.
Freedom gives us a chance to realize our human and individual uniqueness. Absolute power can also bestow uniqueness: to have absolute power is to have the power to reduce all the people around us to puppets, robots, toys, or animals, and be the only man in sight. Absolute power achieves uniqueness by dehumanizing others.
To sum up: Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.Eric Hoffer
I think that Obama doesn’t like his job, actually. I think that he is genuinely of a professorial disposition in the sense that I think that he’s interested in chewing over the pros and cons, and he doesn’t like, he doesn’t like power and he doesn’t know how to exercise power. And I think knowing how to exercise power is absolutely crucial. He doesn’t understand how to underpin his ideas with the political gritty, granular business of getting it done. And that kind of gap has just widened and widened and widened.
Barack Obama
de Maat, Martin
de Maistre, Joseph
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