As a Matter of Heart: A nuclear engineering professor’s life-changing journey from safety to self by William E. Kastenberg

Author:William E. Kastenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seena River Press
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Freeze and Flee

Everything that irritates us about others can lead to an understanding of ourselves.

—Carl Jung

“WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN resonance and coherence?” Paul asked me. “Can they be used to describe a group dynamic that achieves that elu­sive Aha moment?”

Paul and I were meeting in France, this time at an outdoor café in Aix-en-Provence, a beautiful walled city twenty miles from Marseilles, where he and Françoise were living. I’d been invited to give a series of lectures on reactor safety to a group of young scholars at Cadarache, the French nuclear research laboratory just north of Aix. This was a welcome chance for me to pick up the conversation he and I had started in India.

Paul always asked me great questions, mostly soliciting distinctions from me that I hadn’t even thought of before, especially regarding a range of scientific and technical phenomena. He was one of the few men I’d ever met who wanted to know what I thought and how I felt about science and technology—and how both affected the natural and social worlds. He was the only person I’d engaged with who was attempting to translate my scientific and technologic acumen as a context for how individuals and groups process information—and he was including me in that exploration. While Jackie had also attempted to make bridges between her communication model and science—but on her own—Paul wanted my input to formulate his thinking. The collegiality was compelling. And he wanted to know me personally. I can’t recall ever having that kind of relationship with a man, except perhaps with my college roommate. Paul and I were learning from each other—something that fed my soul.

Answering Paul’s question led us to a discussion about how the concepts of resonance and coherence are often used interchangeably, although they are different physical phenomena. I explained that resonance had to do with exciting an object in its natural frequency, like Ella Fitzgerald singing a note that can cause a wine glass to vibrate and shatter—as seen in that TV commercial. Coherence has to do with the phenomenon that causes a photon beam to lase, wherein the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation, namely light, becomes a unified whole in space and time—the photons don’t scatter. Paul understood my explanation, although I cannot recall which phenomenon best illustrated the Aha moment he was wanting to describe.

Paul had what I had considered a remarkable ability not only to understand himself but also to know others through his curiosity and patience. The more specificity he garnered by asking questions, the better he understood the person he was relating to. In fact, I hadn’t realized that, before meeting him, I’d been habituated to providing information rather than questioning people and learning to understand them. As he’d been a transformational coach and trainer for more than forty years, he was a master at asking “interested” questions and getting to know people. Paul was becoming a role model for me. I was beginning to appreciate that the notion of consciousness

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.