Primaries And Domains - by Harry Palmer

Primaries and Domains
by Harry Palmer

A domain is a sphere or area of activity. It's an area for which you assume some responsibility and in which you have some influence. There are physical domains and consciousness domains. We are going to start by talking about physical domains.

Similar domains, by definition, are in the same range of magnitude, such as farms in a valley. Each farm is the domain of one farmer who works the farm and makes the decisions about plantings and harvests. The farmer assumes some responsibility for the farm and has some influence on what is grown or produced.

The farmer may have employees who work in his domain, but they have lesser amounts of influence. You could create a scale of the influence each participant has in a particular domain. For instance, the farmer is the boss and makes the major decisions, the farm foreman gives orders to the workers, and the workers do what they are told. We are describing three levels of participation in this domain. The farmer, the foreman, and the workers are all operating in the same domain, but they have different powers of influence over the events in that domain.

You could change domain. Say the foreman has his own farm, and the first farmer goes to help with the foreman's harvest. The farmer moving from the domain of his farm to the domain of the foreman's farm changes his role. He goes from being the boss to being the worker.

The two farms are domains in same range of magnitude. We could call them family farms.

What would happen if the first farmer went to help the foreman and, forgetting what domain he was in, tried to participate as the boss? Uh-oh, friction. Maybe an argument. How would you feel if your neighbor came into your house and told you what TV channel you had to watch? Maybe you would say, "Not in my domain, you don't."

The participants in a domain work out their own right-to-influence scale. It may be arrived at by competition, as it is in nature, or it may be arrived at by agreement, as it is, ideally, among friends. There are also chance ways of establishing right-to-influence scales such as flip of a coin.

You could call any of these right-to-influence scales the politics of the domain. Anytime you have a domain with more than one participant, you are going to have politics.

There are also domains of different magnitudes.

Domains in the same order of magnitude often form collectives. The collective, taken as a whole, is a domain of greater magnitude. The president of the farmer's cooperative operates in a domain of greater magnitude than the farmer does.

So we've got two ideas here. We have the idea of influential power within a domain, and we have the idea of different magnitudes of domains.

In the domain of the bow and arrow, the best archer had the most influence. However, when he stumbled into the domain of the cannon, he quickly lost his influence. The cannon is a different magnitude of domain.

Another example of a domain in a different order of magnitude is the county or the province in which our farms exist. The reason we call a county or province a different order of magnitude is not just because of its size--you could have a farm the size of a county. The real difference is in the magnitude of influence. A county commissioner has a greater magnitude of power to influence events than a farmer has. The next higher level of domain might be the state in which the county is located. Again, this is a change in order of magnitude. The state governor has greater magnitude of influence than a county commissioner has.

You not only have a pecking order within a domain, but you actually have a pecking order of magnitudes of domains.

Even though the governor is the political boss in the domain of the state, and the farmer is the political boss in the domain of the farm, they have different magnitudes of influence.

The president of the country has more power to influence than the governor, because the country is a domain of greater magnitude than the state.

If the farmer looks across the valley and makes the primary, "I'm going to build a hydroelectric dam," what's going to happen? The other farmers are going to object. His neighbors are going to turn into secondaries. He doesn't really have the power to create that primary, because it's outside his domain~ He's going to have to work very hard to handle his neighbors' secondaries.

The governor can look across the same valley and make the primary, "I'm going to build a hydroelectric dam." Some farmers may object to having their land flooded, but he is the governor and their objections are just very small secondaries. He does and now the primary a few times, pays the farmers off or throws them in jail--he doesn't need their agreement--and starts construction on dam. If you're governor, you're not going to let a few protesting farmers spoil your dam primary.

Unfortunately, the valley the governor picked to build a dam is one of the favorite vacation spots of the president. Suddenly the governor finds an executive order on his desk halting construction on the dam. This dam secondary is coming from the president who operates in a greater domain.

Have you ever tried to make a primary and run into secondaries from a domain that is a magnitude above the domain you are operating in?

Have you ever had an Avatar student complain because his primary to win the lottery didn't work? You See, he's on the farm, and he's trying to run the country.

I once had a student ask me if I could levitate. I had to say no. What I should have said was, "Do you have the power to declare war on Canada?"

If you make the primary, "When I drop my pencil it will fall to the ceiling," what's going to happen? A secondary called gravity.

It's not a matter of faith that your pencil doesn't fall upward. It's a violation of the rules of a greater domain than the one in which you are operating. Again, you're trying to issue a presidential order from the domain of the farmer. It's like saying to the hired man, "Plant the oats, feed the chickens, and then balance the national budget." Different domains!

I think it would be safe, at least for now, to say that every domain defines a sphere in which you have the freedom to create, but also defines the limits of your creating. Learning the freedoms and limits of the domain you are operating in is called living.

When you repeatedly come up against the limits of the domain you are operating in--meaning your primaries are overwhelmed by secondaries from a more powerful domain--it is time to move up an order of magnitude. Time to play a bigger game.

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