Cultural Comment – Soul Needs

Education is a mess – is there an integrative way to teach?

I have updated an introduction to the SunWALK model of human-centred studies;

SunWALK: Summary of the main meanings of the components represented in

the model and its ‘logo-diagram-mandala’ – providing a teacher’s process model

SunWALK: Summary of the main meanings of the components represented in

the model and its ‘logo-diagram-mandala’ – providing a teacher’s process model

Give me a brief introduction:

SunWALK grew out of reflection on many years of teaching children and adults and particularly a period of five years teaching in a RC middle school – theorizing my practice via a PhD and practising my theory day-to-day.

SunWALK simply says that the quality of all of our lives will be higher if we undertake all education within the framework of deepening our humanity.

Deepening our humanity is a matter of developing technical competencies within the chief dimensions of the human spirit; Caring (the Humanities), Creativity (the Arts) and Criticality (the Sciences & Philosophy) – all in local, national and world Communities. These are the ‘4Cs’ of the model – 3 intra-personal, 1 inter-personal.

We and our one planet will be better of if all of the technical stuff, from learning to read to Masters degrees in engineering, take place in the context of humanization/the 4Cs. This requires international, national, school & classroom commitment to deepening the best of being human as the context for learning the technical.

We can’t afford to have character and morality and compassion as hoped-for accidental outcomes. Moral Education, PSME, RE etc. don’t work as bolt-on extras. They need to be the general context in which competencies are developed.

It is a model based on the energy flow of the human spirit – that is the given. That is physical, mental and spiritual energy that flows through all living human beings.

That energy, the human spirit, is the true ’stuff of education’. With the best of the past teachers need to equip children to face tomorrow’s challenges which will always be a mixture of new problems combined with eternally recurrent problems. Building all education with will be the medium with which the teacher works to nurture and challenge balanced development.

Today we have lost the balance between specialization, and whole-systems thinking and acting – SunWALK model brings into harmony the best of ‘Western’ & ‘Eastern’ world-views.

OK – so what’s the ‘Sun’ and the ‘WALK in the model’?

The ‘Sun’ = the individual’s spiritual inspiration & values sources – accumulated and ongoing, as operating internally and as expressed in speech and behaviour.

WALK = Willing & Wise Action through Loving & Knowing – here seen as the general goal for education, and as the interiority, character and behaviour of the student.

The model/logo combines a range of sub-models including the following:

a) An ‘interior’ model of the human spirit – in relation to ‘the world’.

b) A model for re-positioning education within being & becoming human – in the world with others.

c) A general model of the curriculum – for primary, secondary and higher education.

d) A framework for the analysis and evaluation of teaching episodes or projects.

e) A model of education that makes non-faith-specific spiritual and moral education intrinsic to all learning.

THE MODEL AND THE PROCESS IN ONE (long) SENTENCE: –

The SunWALK model of spiritualizing pedagogy sees human education as the

storied

development of

meaning, which is

constructed, and de-constructed,

physically, mentally and spiritually, through

Wise & Willing

Action, via

Loving and Knowing – developed in

Community, through the

‘Dialectical Spiritualization [1]’of

Caring, Creativity & Criticality processes, all undertaken in the light of the

‘Sun’ of chosen higher-order

values and beliefs, using best available,appropriate

content.

These underlined concerns are central components and focuses of the practice and theory in the model.

This is an intense combination of theory and practice. It automatically requires the teacher to practice their theory and theorise their practice – dynamically as practice-based research. It automatically enables the classroom to be connected to the school & community as a whole and to e.g. a relevant department in a university.

It attempts to suffuse all teaching with the demands, challenges and joy of being human in the world with others. But it seeks to bring together the Whole and the parts, the ineffable and the concepts – not just concepts because as Heschel (1971:7) says, “Concepts are delicious snacks with which we try to alleviate our amazement.”

The diagram/logo/

The outer ring of the SunWALK logo combines two dimensions:

1 ‘Community i.e. the social,interpersonal dimension of interaction with other individuals or groups.

2 ‘Cultural sources’ including such dimensions as the traditions, the political & the legal.

The three major divisions of the arts,sciences and humanities are here thought of as the stored, yet potentially dynamic, accumulation of knowledge and beliefs and procedures – everything from galleries to written laws of physics that the individual can draw upon or be influenced by. This is the ‘stuff out there’ rather than the interiority of consciousness in which there is the perpetual flow and re-shaping, focusing de-focusing etc. of heart-mind.

In SunWALK everything within the inner circle = a representation of ‘interiority’, i.e. human consciousness – the human spirit.

The human spirit is presented intra-personally as 3 ‘voices’ – 3 modes of being & of engaging with reality & of knowing.

The three emanate from the singleness of ‘heart-mind’, consciousness.

They are presented (metaphorically) as the ‘primary colours’ of Creativity (the yellow of inspiration), Criticality (the blue of reason) & Caring (the red warmth of love).

Creativity is the ‘I’ voice of subjective engagement via an artistic medium – it is concerned with subjective knowing and is particularly related to the core virtue ‘beauty’ and its products are of course ‘the Arts’.

Criticality is the ‘IT’ voice of objective engagement which enables progress in the Sciences ( & Maths., Philosophy and ‘critical’ studies). It is concerned with objective knowing – and it is related particularly to the core virtue ‘truth’. The products of course are the sciences and technology – but also philosophy and critical studies.

Caring is the ‘WE’ voice which enables moral engagement – for progress in the moral domain and in service of others. It is concerned with social knowing – related particularly to the core virtue ‘goodness’ and to ‘the Humanities’.

All three of course need to be conditioned by the pre-eminent virtue of justice. All students need to have these ways of engaging with reality developed in a balanced way. High technical competence combined with moral dwarfism leads to ……

The physical dimension is seen as the instrument for the flow of spirit in all of its forms – e.g. via dance, drama & PE and sports.

Each individual develops her/his I, WE and IT voices, the 3Cs, via socialization, starting in the family, the local community and then later in formal education. A sense of justice is seen as paramount intrapersonally as well as inter-personally i.e. it enables us to engage with that which is beautiful, good or true with balance, clarity & due weight.

The essential process in all 4Cs is multi-level dialogue. In the case of the individual dialogue is seen as meditation, reflection and inner-talk. In the case of groups it is dialectical process via consultation.

The ‘Celtic’ knot that surrounds the central shield indicates that the 3Cs are simply aspects of the one human spirit– the flow of ‘heart-mind’.

The white shield at the centre represents the meditative state in which there is no ‘focused’ engagement via one of the 3Cs – and in which there is relatively little of the interference or chatter that we experience in the unquiet mind.

This can enable us to ‘go beyond ourselves’, i.e. transcend our normal knowing – any of the 3Cs (I, WE or IT modes), as gateways, can be a pathway to the transcendent and to subsequent improved insight into reality.

The black dot at the centre is the ‘well-spring’ of consciousness. For artists (and great scientists) it is the Muse. For religionists it is the voice of God within (albeit distorted by the dust of self). For non-religionists it is the inner source of spirit as energy & inspiration – the bits of realization and insight that come to us for which we don’t make an effort.

Educating the human spirit is seen as nurturing, and cultivating, the life-force which culminates in the developed human who, through higher-order consciousness, realizes abilities from within Caring, Creative or Critical engagements.

Teaching is seen as nurturing and cultivating what is normally present, almost from birth, & certainly by the time we go to school – namely the flow of spirit expressed in nascent forms of Caring, Creativity, and Criticality – in Community with others. Holistic Learning takes place when the learner uses Creativity, Criticality and Caring – in Community – inspired by higher-order values – in dynamic combinations such as Creativity providing texts for criticality – which then, via dialogue, produce/attract the spirit for more creativity.

In SunWALK spirituality is not a dimension; it is the model as a whole. In SunWALK moral education is not a dimension – it is intrinsic to all of its praxis.

The SunWALK logo can also be seen as a mandala, or even as a plan drawing for a fountain or an ‘arts centre of light’!

SunWALK is a major shift to a process view of the world, of being human and of educating our young people. It rejects a worldview that is limited to the mechanistic, the ‘human-as-computer, the fragmentary and the materialistic; seeking instead modelling that is based on flow/process, holism and the spiritual.

SunWALK is designed to enable teachers and students to become agents of change to transform a world that is still operated as atomistic, mechanistic and materialistic into one that is holistic, dialogic, and derived from the best processes and products of the human spirit.

The SunWALK logo and model of education Copyright Roger Prentice 1995 & 2009

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Authenticity and Authentic Business

Below is information from the front page of the Authentic Business website which still offers a wide range of very interesting materials and ideas – as such it deserves wider circulation. Let’s hope that someone might develop it further.

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This site has masses of inspiring and fascinating content but is no longer regularly updated. For more up to date information and inspiration about authenticity for business and individuals please follow the links below.

Authentic Transformation – bring more authenticity into your life and work

Authentic Inspiration – weekly inspiration, podcasts, inspiring books, movies etc

Authentic Guides – business service professionals working with authenticity


Our battles with dragons. – more>>
Recently, a cancer victim friend of mine wrote to me of her thoughts and feelings expressed in a short piece of prose. Her piece was called ‘Fighting the Dragons’ and I reproduce here for you…
The law of escalating efficiencies – the power of the fourth be with us! – more>>
The simplest energy efficiency and renewables actions – taken seriously – can carry us right across ‘the energy gap’ – in one single bound! There is so much bad news around climate chaos that it is easy to lose heart. We are so ‘hooked’ on the belief that we ‘need’ vast amounts of energy to live decent lives that we all shun tackling the root of the problem.
A Fairer Way to do Business – the story of a young women embarking on building a Fair Trade business. – more>>
Remould – Fair Trade Clothing is run by Cathy Tiffany from her shop in New Mills, Derbyshire. Cathy wanted to sell alternative fashion to local people who had an interest in ethical and Fair Trade clothing. Cathy has recently expanded her range to children’s wear and is working hard to develop her online business to reach a wider spectrum of ethically minded people.
Empathy, a wonderful aspect of EQ emotional intelligence. – more>>
The other evening I was at home relaxing watching television and an old episode of ‘Airport’ came on. I always enjoyed the series. It always reminds me of my times of travel and excitement and of seeing people bustling on the concourse and feeling my hopes rising and feeling as though my dreams are appearing through the mist of uncertainty and becoming more solid. Watching the screen you see such a diversity of travellers and then all the staff of Heathrow [it could be any airport really]. The end credits to ‘Love Actually’ always come to mind as well when watching this program.
Raising public awareness in achieving tourism sustainability on the Island of Rhodes – more>>
Public participation is a key ingredient to sustainability in tourism. Raising public awareness requires strong political leadership. There are two fundamental questions that the leaders and those who hold the power on matters of hospitality and tourism on the island of Rhodes should address: (1) what is sustainability in tourism? and (2) why they should raise public awareness?.
This Way Up – more>>
Do you ever have the feeling that you’re being lied to about just don’t know what? That there’s something wrong with the way society defines your success, but you just can’t put your finger on it? Do you question that there has to be more to life than getting a job, making some money, working until you’re sixty, then retiring to the country
Learning from others – more>>
You may well have read last October on this web site an article I wrote entitled “A Bridge in Life”. If not, you can still see it or you can even email me for a copy. In the article I wrote about my being a retired Police Officer and the dangers I faced on a daily basis ~ the journey of my life through and from that phase ~ and my soulful expression these days through my work, interactions with people and my written poetry and prose.
What does it take to change your life for the better? – more>>
I am fortunate enough to have the opportunity to meet some of the most inspiring possible people. These people are not famous (yet), they are not especially rich or successful (yet), but they do have one thing in common.
What you don’t yet know! – more>>
Increased land fill taxes. Rising energy prices. Emissions taxes. Unpredictable weather. For most of our lives the environment has been a more or less free resource to be used and abused at will. That situation has changed and that means changes in the way we run our businesses.
A FAIRTRADE REVOLUTION – more>>
New Consumers change the world via the High Street as Fairtrade becomes a habit of a lifestyle so Fairtrade producers get a fair deal. It’s Fairtrade Fortnight 6-19 March, and New Consumer, the UK’s leading Fairtrade and ethical lifestyle magazine, is celebrating the achievement of new consumers as you continue to fuel a Fairtrade Revolution. You are changing the world, by taking ten small, easy steps to support Fairtrade a proven, practical way to alleviate poverty.

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the

PhD. Summaries are HERE

Coming Home: an Introduction to Spirituality

There are many who yearn for spiritual food who are put off by the antics and corruption of religions. Perennial Philosophy or mystical paths such as Sufism can provide that food. But what are the basics of this core belief that transcends religions?

This is the beginning of an attempt to provide such a n i.ntroduction. Currently I am developing it in a question and answer format.

Coming Home

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Waking up to the Spirit you have always been

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A book for the non religiously spiritual.

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Roger Prentice

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Introduction:

This is an attempt, using questions and answers, to present simply and clearly the truth about being spiritual – initially without reference to religions.

This is for family, friends and students – and all those who want to realize, i.e. realize the deepest in themselves. I haven’t achieved this to a high order. Many of you can out-do me in many good things. But it seems my task is to collect and re-present these insights. I am painfully aware of my shortcomings. But as Heschel says to be human is to suffer the knowledge of the difference between what we should be and what we are. The only ‘crime’ is to say ‘that’s the way I am and I’m not going to change’. To say that is also very dangerous. We are all designed to struggle toward our own perfection – to become more and realize our gifts more fully in the mutuality of love.

This is an action-based account i.e. there are a range of simple ‘To do’ practices that can help you relax into:

To do: Sit quietly as often as you can – and let your breath breathe you. (More to follow)

Part 1 is an attempt to present the ‘bare bones’ without reference to the great and the good, or to philosophies or religions.

Part 2 goes a stage deeper and introduces ideas from some of the great and the good – people such as Ken Wilber.

Part 3 goes deeper.

Coming Home

Part 1- Re-finding our-selves = re-finding the spirit we thought we had lost

Q. What is spirit?

A. All that isn’t simply physical.

Q. Does that mean mind as well as feelings?

A. Yes if we put mind and heart together we get ‘heart-mind’. Heart-mind = our interior landscape or simply consciousness – the great inner ‘sea’ of feelings and thoughts. Neither heart nor mind in this sense are physical.

Q. Is that all spirit is?

A. It a) is the life-force b) the force of attraction that holds all bodies together and c) it is walking on in the right spirit – until all becomes Spirit.

Q. Are there other names for the spiritual?

A. Yes many – love, energy, chi etc.

Q. So spirit, or love as attraction, holds everything together?

A. Yes. Another definition of being spiritual is ‘to live for others’, to be of service.

Q. What else comes from spirit, apart from the warmth of love?

A. The light of the mind, knowing. ‘Warmth and holding together’ and ‘the light of seeing and knowing’ – both flow from love.

Q. What about everyday activities? Is walking spiritual?

A. It can be.

Q. Is running spiritual?

A. It can be.

Q. Is Sky-diving spiritual?

A. It can be.

Q. Is sex spiritual?

A. It can be.

Q. Is breathing spiritual?

A. It can be. The great yogic teaching is that the breath is that which connects the physical and the spiritual.

Q. Why ‘can be’ in all of these?

A. It is ‘yes’ if we a) re-cognize such activities in the context of the spiritual and b) realize the eternal in ourselves.

But it is ‘no’ if we remain tied to the miseries of our own ego.

Q. Does that mean that everyone is spiritual?

A. Yes but each needs to plug in and switch on! We all spring from the Whole, just as sunlight emanates from the sun. But we have to allow ourselves to feel, & acknowledge, the awareness that deep down we know was there from the beginning.

Q. Is being spiritual a normal state of being?

A. Yes it is simply being more than self-centredness. It is being conscious of the Whole/the Source/the Spirit that is beyond our individual ego. This consciousness gradually widens the circle of its concern and allows us to lessen our attachment to our ego.

Q. So loving more widely – like the outflowing circles from a dropped stone in a pond – is freeing?

A. Yes – those who really achieve insight cease to be run by the pleasures and torments of the the ‘small self’ – the ego and tru freedom increases..

Q. Isn’t this something that only special people – saints or mystics – can do?

A. No it is part of being human and we all have such experiences. But we fail to realize their closeness and fullness, mainly because they are so simple & there all the time – we’ve failed to notice, for want of quietness and contemplation! In any case we are all mystical just as we are all philosophical its part of the package of being human – just as much as is being social, sexual and creative.

Q. How do we make those experiences a stronger part of our lives?

A. Contemplation or meditation – as one source says ‘Be still, and know …’.

Q. How do we stop or prevent ourselves being spiritual?

A. Not staying conscious of that Whole from which we spring (emanate). And by staying attached to the pleasures and torments of ego-identification.

Q. Is there any other sense that someone might not be, or stop being, spiritual?

A. When they are attached to any thing that prevents her/him from experiencing their true Self.

Q. How many kinds of attachment are there?

A. Many – we think of gross ones such as alcohol and drugs but many are subtle – materialism, status etc – some are very subtle, perhaps ultimately even the attachment to not being attached!

Q. What do I do if violent or filthy or self-destructive thoughts or ‘demons’ come into my head?

A. Let them pass as though they were moving across a cinema screen and say, ‘Hello good morning/ eve etc, thank you and goodbye.’ Our True Self is not our thoughts. Thoughts come from the ego.

Q. Why what good would that do?

A. It will help you understand that you are not your thoughts.

Q. If I’m not my thoughts then what am I?

A. You are part of the Whole, in the temporary emanation and form of being uniquely you for 80 or so years.

Q. The Whole of what?

A. The Universe and beyond (everything – and all that is beyond that isn’t a thing!)

Q. What else am I?

A. You are star-stuff made conscious (SEE the 3 recent BBC physics documentaries called ‘Atom’.)

Q. What else am I?

A. You are ‘a hairy bag of sea-soup’. (This is not only a joke but is an accurate statement about our physical make up and evolution!) Science and spirituality are two ways of approaching truth.

Q. Do rituals and practices help?

A. Yes providing we don’t allow them to breed complacency, narrowness, and self-satisfaction i.e. a state of attachment. The most important are contemplation/meditation, prayer, and service to others.

Q. What really is contemplation or meditation?

A. Being still to experience our True Self, instead of the mind chatter and ‘TV interference’ of the ego.

Q. And what is the ultimate secret of the universe?

A. It is pointed to, not described, in these the final sentences of Wilber’s The Eye of Spirit;

When the great Zen master Fa-ch’ang was dying, a squirrel screeched out on the roof. ‘It’s just this’ he said, ‘and nothing more’. SFB P.258

Q. I don’t geddit!

A. Here it is again from another master;

The world is illusory

Brahman alone is real;

Brahman is the world. (SFB p19)

Q. Still don’t geddit!

A. Here it is again from another master;

There is neither creation nor destruction,

Neither destiny nor free-will;

Neither path nor achievement;

This is the final truth. (One Taste p468)

Q. Still don’t geddit!

A. ‘Walk on‘ (The Buddha). Walk on in the right spirit – lighten up and have forgiving and compassionate fun – until all becomes Spirit.

End of Part 1 (To be developed)

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All postings to this site relate to the central SunWALK model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

A motto for the UK

In reflecting on whether the UK should have a motto to express the national spirit – just as France has Liberté, égalité, fraternité – a wit wrote to the Times and suggested: DIPSO, FATSO, BINGO, ASBO, TESCO. Having a motto was a suggestion from Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

For American cousins, cross-cultural analysts and other UK observers a background article and other witticisms can be found at the TIMESonline HERE

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All postings to this site relate to the central SunWALK model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

Wilberian Studies; integral and holistic studies that draw on inspiration from Ken Wilber

I therefore sought to outline a philosophy of universal integralism. Put differently, I sought a world philosophy—or an integral philosophy—that would believably weave together the many pluralistic contexts of science, morals, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world’s great wisdom traditions. Not on the level of details—that is finitely impossible; but on the level of orienting generalizations . . . a holistic philosophy for a holistic Kosmos, a genuine Theory of Everything. —Ken Wilber (TOE, p. 38).

For my own work, and for the benefit of those with similar interests, I have decided to keep a list of sources that I come across that fall under the category of ‘Wilberian studies’. That is integral and holistic studies that draw on inspiration from Ken Wilber. These include leadership studies, education, philosophy, psychology etc. I am collecting these interesting variations on, and adaptions and applications of Wilber’s four quadrants and three voices of I, WE and IT. – SEE especially Wilber’s The Marriage of Sense and Soul.

My own diagram/application is at the foot of this posting.

Here are the first few other Wilberian ‘four quadrants’ variations, adaptations and applications ;

5 The Promise of Integralism A Critical Appreciation of Ken Wilber’s Integral Psychology by Christian de Quincey

HERE

4 Intimations of Jung in Integrative Psychology and in Ken Wilber’s Quadrants by John Giannini

HERE

3 Integral Spiral Dynamics by Michael Dowd

HERE – click to see full size. Click HERE to see the 4 parts of the diagram in detail.

2 Developing Leadership Capacity: Searching for the Integral – by Wood and Hessler-Key

HERE

1 Prof Slaughter’s article

HERE

My own application;
HERE was to suggest that teachers see the raw material of their work as the flow of spirit (the student’s spirit and their own) – that spirit inevitably being socialized in to the three voices of I, WE and IT. Teaching thus becomes the work of nurturing refinement in abilities within the I WE and IT voices. The real concern is the learner and her/his holistic development
The real stuff of education thus is spirit – that uses community and cultural stuff drawn from the Arts, Humanities and Sciences – the Arts being the ‘food’ of the I voice, the Humanities being the food of the WE voice and the Sciences being the ‘food’ of the IT voice. Proceeding like this I have suggested constitutes a) integralization and b) spiritualization i.e. a paradigm shift and one that in my personal experience greatly strengthens the academic concerns of teaching.

A video-lecture by Bill Viola – via the Tate Modern

Tate Modern video presentations are HERE

Go HERE to see a video-lecture by Bill Viola.

Bill Viola has been making video tapes, architectural installations, sound environments, electronic music performances and works for television for over 30 years. His video installations such as Nantes Triptych 1992 and Five Angels for the Millennium 2001, which are both in the Tate Collection, are total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound.

On the eve of a major new exhibition, LOVE/DEATH: The Tristan Project, at Haunch of Venison in London, Viola talks about his career and recent work.

In collaboration with Haunch of Venison

“All works of art though visible represent invisible things,” (by or about Bill Viola)

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NB All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

Flatland, Modernism, pre-modernism and post-modernism – Ken Wilber’s view

If you’ve struggled with what people actually mean by postmodernism and its relationship to modernism and pre-modernism you might appreciate these extracts from Ken Wilber’s Integral Psychology – I certainly did.

See also my other posting on I, WE & IT and also the posting on Mythos and Logos including Karen Armstrong’s work.

Modernism, pre-modernism and post-modernism

In other words, the four quadrants (or the Big Three) are actually the underpinnings of the modern differentiation of the values spheres of art, morals and science. Where premodernity had tended to fuse, or not clearly differentiate, the Big Three, modernity clearly differentiated them and set each free to pursue its own path. This differentiation was part of the dignity of modernity, which, in allowing each domain to pursue its own truths, allowed each to make stunning and far-reaching discoveries , discoveries that, even the harshest critics agree, set modernity apart from premodernity.

But something else set modernity apart. The differentiation of the big Three went too far into the dissociation of the Big Three : the dignity drifted into disaster, and this allowed an imperialistic science to dominate the other spheres and claim that they possessed no inherent reality of their own (scientism, scientific materialism, one-dimensional man, the disenchantment of the world). Gone was mind and soul and spirit, and in their place, as far as the eye could see, the unending dreariness of a world of its; ” a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying a material, endlessly, meaninglessly.”

And so it came about that virtually the entire spectrum of consciousness, and certainly its higher levels, (soul and spirit), were reduced to permutations and combinations of matter and bodies. Put bluntly, all ‘Is’ and ‘we’s’ were reduced to ‘its’, to objects of the scientific gaze, which no matter how long or hard it looked, could find nothing resembling the Great Nest of human possibilities, but saw only endless patterns of process ‘its’, scurrying here and there. Integral Psychology P.64

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Thus , it seems that premodernity had at least one great strength that modernity lacked: it recognized the entire Great Nest of Being, which is basically a general map of higher human potentials. But premodernity also had at least one great weakness; it did not fully differentiate the value spheres at any of the levels of the Great Nest. Thus, among other things, objective-scientific investigation of the spectrum was hampered; the specific and often cultural expressions of the Great Nest were taken to be universally valid; and the moral injunctions recommended to all were tied to those limited cultural expressions. Giordano Bruno might have experienced many of he upper levels of the Great Nest, but because the value spheres were not fully differentiated at large and their individual freedoms were not protected by law and custom, the Inquisition cheerfully burned him at the stake.

Modernity, on the other hand, did manage to differentiate the Big Three of art, morals and science, on a large scale, so that each began to make phenomenal discoveries. But as the Big Three dissociated, and scientific colonialism began its aggressive career, all ‘Is’ and all ‘we’s’ were reduced to patterns of objective ‘its’, and thus all the interior stages of consciousness – reaching from body to mind to soul to spirit – were summarily dismissed as so much superstitious nonsense. The Great Nest collapsed into scientific materialism – into what we will be calling “flatland” – and there the modern world, by and large, still remains.

Our job, it thus appears, is to take the strengths of both premodernity and modernity, and jettison their weaknesses. Pp 64-65

To re-legitimize other ways of knowing, to work clearly with and between all three I, WE & IT ways of knowing (plus community-tradition) brings the possibility of re-enchantment and balanced development of the individual and of societies!

The model at the heart of this site utilizes Wilber’s triadic structure you can read a summary HERE.

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

“From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die,” a great site on art and spirituality

A great site – I recommend this very rich essay by Susan Ressler – ‘It’s all about the apple – or is it ? HERE

My own reading of the Adam and Eve creation myth is that it is an allegory concerning a developmental stage in human development – the stage at which consciousness as we now understand it came about.

The linking of women with inferiority, uncleanness and the guilt for human corruptibility is the crime against women for which men have paid and are paying – as well as the terrible cost borne by women and children. My belief is that human maturity, and therefore justice and development, will come about proportionate to the balanced development of feminine and masculine spirits in men and women together. Equality for women is part of this and a step on the way.

I have written more about my reading of Adam and Eve HERE

In her introduction Ressler says;

“Spirituality” and “religion” are not synonymous terms, yet for many of us, our spirituality derives from what we call “organized religion”: a set of institutionalized beliefs and practices based on sacred texts such as the Bible or Koran, and imbued in the teachings of spiritual leaders such as Christ, Mohammed or Confucius. Moreover, one could say that Western culture (meaning that of Europe and the Americas) has inherited its cultural ethos from the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, which still has a pervasive influence on all aspects of Western society. Therefore, this essay begins with the “Apple” or, more precisely, how women artists of the American west have chosen to re-present the central creation myth of Western culture and the Judeo-Christian tradition: the story of Adam and Eve.

Notwithstanding the problematics of women artists and their gendered relationship to the position of Eve in this story, “From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die,” (Ecclesiasticus 25:24), there is no single viewpoint expressed by the women who reconfigure this iconography today. In Maxine Olson’s It’s All About the Apple (figure 1), Eve and a somewhat disgruntled-looking Virgin Mary appear to be mesmerized by a seductive Venus, flanked by gaping orchids and an Egyptian figure who appears as contented as a cat. Meanwhile, a young putti-like child has momentarily shifted his attention to Eve from the can of S&W apple-sauce he holds in his hand, reminding us that Eve is the central player in this modern parable.

Kathleen Campbell’s Eve, in Ominous Prophecy III (figure 3), depicts a different narrative. Campbell intends the gesture of this dark-skinned Eve, who holds the apple in her left hand while extending her right hand, to echo that of the snake from Michelangelo’s The Fall of Man. Campbell says, “Here I use the traditional spiritual iconography of Western Civilization as a metaphor for the bleak prospects which await humankind if we continue in a course seemingly headed for destruction.”

In “It’s All About the Apple, Or is it?,” Eve’s story becomes a departure point for exploring multiple perspectives on contemporary spirituality which include, but are not limited to, the Judeo-Christian tradition. The essay is wrapped around the artworks of nearly two-dozen women who come from a variety of traditions: Christian, Jewish, Native-American, Asian, Earth-based and Eco-Feminist, to name a few. As if to counter Kathleen Campbell’s dire prophecy, the essay concludes with artists who ply their spirituality with political activism. And the final artist in this essay, Karen Carson, whose Sandwich (figure 2) bespeaks yet another “take” on “Birth” and “Death,” shows us that, in a profound sense, we become what we consume, as we participate in these processes.

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A great site HERE connected to another great site (go to bottom of page) connected to another great site ‘The Women in Photography Archive’ – and a whole lot more (but finding your way around is a bit of a problem)

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

“The Self is an ocean without a shore”: Bill Viola, a perfect match of spirit and form?

THE ARGUMENT The past lives only in the present in that our consciousness is marked and shaped by those whose insights we come to re-realize – including those that come from the great spiritual teachers. Memories are like art and sacred writings that are simply marks made – but marks made that can transport us to our own high realization in inspired consciousness. Bill Viola is now re-presenting us through his mastery of one of newest of mediums, video, with access to that spiritual core at the heart of the great world wisdom traditions. Is this a perfect post-modernist match of spirit and form?

In my SunWALK model about ‘what it is to be human‘ and about ‘how can we spiritualize education without the exclusivity of sectarian religion‘ I was inspired by several quotations as well as by Seamus Heaney’s poem Personal Helicon.

Bill Viola from ‘Ocean Without a Shore‘ – click to see full size – Source artdaily

“One of the things the camera taught me was to see the world, the same world that my eye sees, in its metaphoric, symbolic state. This condition is, in fact, always present, latent in the world around us .”
– Bill Viola

I was interested to see news about Bill Viola’s recent work ‘Ocean Without a Shore’ (shown at Chiesa di San Gallo, Venice). Viola’s website cites the following two inspirations;

“The Self is an ocean without a shore. Gazing upon it has no
beginning or end, in this world and the next.”
Ibn al’Arabi (1165 – 1240)

From the Viola site we learn;

‘Ocean Without a Shore’ is about the presence of the dead in our lives. The three stone altars in the church of San Gallo become portals for the passage of the dead to and from our world. Presented as a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death, the video sequence documents a succession of individuals slowly approaching out of darkness and moving into the light. Each person must then breakthrough an invisible threshold of water and light in order to pass into the physical world. Once incarnate however, all beings realize that their presence is finite and so they must eventually turn away from material existence to return from where they came. The cycle repeats without end.

The work was inspired by a poem by the 20th century Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop:

“ Hearing things more than beings,
listening to the voice of fire,
the voice of water.
Hearing in wind the weeping bushes,
sighs of our forefathers.

The dead are never gone:
they are in the shadows.
The dead are not in earth:
they’re in the rustling tree,
the groaning wood,
water that runs,
water that sleeps;
they’re in the hut, in the crowd,
the dead are not dead.

The dead are never gone,
they’re in the breast of a woman,
they’re in the crying of a child,
in the flaming torch.
The dead are not in the earth:
they’re in the dying fire,
the weeping grasses,
whimpering rocks,
they’re in the forest, they’re in the house,
the dead are not dead.”
(from David Melzter, ed. Death – An Anthology of Ancient Texts, Songs, Prayers and Stories (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984)

The Ibn al’Arabi quotations reminded me of my attempt to portray our state in visiting ‘the shoreline’ and encountering the unknowable Whole – in my Personal Myth and the four key qutations (SEE below)

The poetic sense of the dead speaking in the ‘dying fire, the weeping grasses’ etc is secondary for me to how they live on in the consciousness that we possess, because of them. Our spirits continue to live out their consciousness through ours.

FOUR KEY QUOTATIONS

The Ibn al’Arabi quotation also reminded me of the inspiration I got from four key quotations in relation to a sense of the Whole and to a panentheistic and Universalist perspective I hoped that they contributed to the leitmotif that made of the thesis parts, a whole;

Text 1)

“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer
the shoreline of mystery.” Unknown author

Text 2)

The search for reason ends at the shore of the known;
on the immense expanse beyond it
only the sense of the ineffable can glide.
It alone knows the route to that
which is remote from experience and understanding.
Neither is amphibious:
reason cannot go beyond the shore,
and the sense of the ineffable
is out of place where we measure, where we weigh…….

Citizens of two realms, we must all sustain dual allegiance:
we sense the ineffable in one realm;
we name and exploit reality in another.

Between the two we set up a system of references,
but can never fill the gap.
They are as far and as close to each other

As time and calendar, as violin and melody,
as life and what lies beyond the last breath.

The tangible phenomena we scrutinize with our reason,

The sacred and indemonstrable we overhear

with the sense of the ineffable.

Heschel A. J. (1971), Man is Not Alone, New York: Octagon Books p.8

Text 3)

Tao, the subtle reality of the universe

cannot be described.

That which can be described in words

is merely a conception of the mind.

Although names and descriptions have been applied to it,

the subtle reality is beyond the description.

One may use the word ‘Nothingness”

to describe the Origin of the universe,

and “Beingness”

to describe the Mother of the myriad things,

but Nothingness and Beingness are merely conceptions.

From the perspective of Nothingness,

one may perceive the expansion of the universe.

From the perspective of Beingness,

one may distinguish individual things.

Both are for the conceptual convenience of the mind.

Although different concepts can be applied,

Nothingness and Beingness

and other conceptual activity of the mind

all come from, the same indescribable subtle Originalness

The Way is the unfoldment of such subtle reality.

Having reached the subtlety of the universe,

one may see the ultimate subtlety,
the Gate of All Wonders.

Ni, Hua-Ching (1997), The Complete Works of Lao Tzu, Santa Monica, USA: Seven Star Communications – Tao The Ching (‘Chapter’ 1)

Text 4)

….set then yourselves towards His holy Court, on the shore of His mighty Ocean, so that the pearls of knowledge and wisdom, which God hath stored up within the shell of His radiant heart, may be revealed unto you….
(Baha’u’llah: Proclamation of Baha’u’llah, Pages: 8-9)

The past lives only in the present in that our consciousness is marked and shaped by those whose insights we come to re-realize – including those that come from the great spiritual teachers. Memories are like art and sacred writings that are simply marks made – but marks made that can transport us to our own high realization in inspired consciousness. Bill Viola is now re-presenting us through his mastery of one of newest of mediums, video, with access to that spiritual core at the heart of the great world wisdom traditions. Is this a perfect post-modernist match of spirit and form?

The mystic inner core of the great world wisdom traditions is incorrectly named as Perennial Philosophy

• There’s a reality beyond the material world:
• Which is uncreated.
• It pervades everything,
• but remains beyond the reach of human knowledge and understanding.
• You approach that reality by:
• Distinguishing ego from true self
• Understanding the nature of desire
• Becoming unattached
• Forgetting about preferences
• Not working for personal gain
• Letting go of thoughts
• Redirecting your attention
• Being devoted
• Being humble
• Invoking that reality
• Surrendering
• That reality approaches you through:
• Grace
• The teacher
• You’re transformed so that you embody that reality by:
• Dying and being reborn

Two views of the structure of Perennial Philosophy are HERE

Viola in our sea of uncertainty, and maelstrom of violence, is helping us re-connect.

Perhaps also Viola is showing us that video can do more fully what photographers – Minor White for example – have longed to do – to ‘en-form’ the spiritual?

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

Inspiring quotations for PhD thesis

Like heroes and heroines certain key sayings inspire us. Here I’m assembling the ones that have meant most to me.

As I re-find them I am putting the NEWEST at the top:

From my thesis;

The four texts that contributed to the leitmotif that, I hope, makes, of the thesis parts, a whole

Text 1)

“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer
the shoreline of mystery.” Unknown author

Text 2)

Citizens of two realms, we must all sustain dual allegiance:
we sense the ineffable in one realm;
we name and exploit reality in another.

Between the two we set up a system of references,
but can never fill the gap.
They are as far and as close to each other

As time and calendar, as violin and melody,
as life and what lies beyond the last breath.

The tangible phenomena we scrutinize with our reason,

The sacred and indemonstrable we overhear

with the sense of the ineffable.

Heschel A. J. (1971), Man is Not Alone, New York: Octagon Books p.8

Text 3)

Tao, the subtle reality of the universe

cannot be described.

That which can be described in words

is merely a conception of the mind.

Although names and descriptions have been applied to it,

the subtle reality is beyond the description.

One may use the word ‘Nothingness”

to describe the Origin of the universe,

and “Beingness”

to describe the Mother of the myriad things,

but Nothingness and Beingness are merely conceptions.

From the perspective of Nothingness,

one may perceive the expansion of the universe.

From the perspective of Beingness,

one may distinguish individual things.

Both are for the conceptual convenience of the mind.

Although different concepts can be applied,

Nothingness and Beingness

and other conceptual activity of the mind

all come from, the same indescribable subtle Originalness

The Way is the unfoldment of such subtle reality.

Having reached the subtlety of the universe,

one may see the ultimate subtlety,
the Gate of All Wonders.

Ni, Hua-Ching (1997), The Complete Works of Lao Tzu, Santa Monica, USA: Seven Star Communications – Tao The Ching (‘Chapter’ 1)

Text 4)

“The utterances of the heart — unlike those of the discriminating intellect — always relate to the whole.” (Jung)

Also from the thesis;

Introduction to Chapter 1 – an ‘overture’

By way of a short introduction I want to ‘sound’, as in an overture, certain ‘notes’, or themes or resonances. They are from writers, and a film-maker, whose statements have come to mean a great deal, in the struggle to search out my own story, and its meaning educationally.

Autobiography is a journey inward. St Augustine said:

Men go to gape at mountain peaks, at the boundless tides of the sea, the broad sweep of rivers, the encircling ocean and the motion of the stars; and yet they leave themselves unnoticed; they do not marvel at themselves.
St. Augustine, Confessions X2

Autobiography is not entirely a matter of re-collecting objective facts: it is re-creation as well as re-collection, but it is a seeking after a kind of truth; the truth of authentically being in oneself. Peter Abbs (1974 p. 7) calls autobiography: the search backwards into time to discover the evolution of the true self. It is, as such, about self-knowing, but something beyond the fripperies of the ego. Baha’u’llah, Founder of the Baha’i religion, in one of His own writings, cites a tradition from Islam: He hath known God who hath known himself. (Baha’u’llah: Gleanings, MARS database3 p.178).

For the theistically religious the more we come to know our true selves, the closer we come to the Divine within us, and vice versa. I make no claim, beyond a few faltering steps, but the ideas continue to inspire.

The ‘Thesis Poem’
I have chosen the following poem by Seamus Heaney (1996 p.14) as ‘the poem’ for the thesis because it shows beautifully how we resonate now, in relation to what we sensed and experienced as children. It also shows how, through metaphor, the objective connects with the subjective to thrill, to the very quick of our being.

About the poem, ‘Personal Helicon’ Pelligrino (2003 p.1) explains;

Mount Helicon is a mountain in Greece, that was, in classical mythology, sacred to Apollo and the Muses. From it flowed two fountains of poetic inspiration. Heaney is here presenting his own source of inspiration, the “dark drop” into personal and cultural memory, made present by the depths of the wells in his childhood. Now, as a man, he is too mature to scramble about on hands and knees, looking into the deep places of the earth, but he has his poetry – and, thank God, so do we.

Of course if Heaney was reading it we would have that wonderful voice, like an aromatic tree giving up the sap, and perfuming the air with all the good things from the soil.

Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney
for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Later I take up the issues of resonance, and of objective and subjective meaning combined in metaphor, and the power of the subjective in personal history, to continue to generate the new in the meaning-making we do. The darkness echoes, as we stare into the part darkness of the self, and its memories – we stare, each a big-eyed Narcissus.

The final ‘sounding’, or theme, in the Introduction to Chapter 1 concerns identity and the moment, which lives on, and in which the past continues to create. The piece is by Jorge Luis Borges4, who says:

Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made
up of a single moment – the moment in which a man finds
out, once and for all, who he is.

The one moment could conceivably be a choice – as in Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life where a group of 22 people are suspended between earth and heaven with a week to answer the important question: “What is the one memory that you choose to carry into the afterlife?” When each chooses his or her memory, this is all that will be remembered for eternity.

Professionally, the lesson, or pair of lessons, upon which this thesis is, in part, an extended reflection contains the one memory I would choose. Ideally it would be the whole of the two ‘story’ lessons.

If it was reduced just to seconds it would be the moment that one ‘deviant’ boy offered an explanation of the possible symbolic meaning of the two fishes that I had drawn on the blackboard. One fish was a line drawing, the other a similar shaped fish, but its shape was delineated via chalk shading (i.e. from ‘the outside’).

“Mr P I think one fish represents bounded imagination, and the other stands for unbounded imagination.”

His brilliantly insightful comment was the jewel in the crown of an outstanding lesson in which the class and I, so I felt, was as ‘one-mind’, intellectually sharp but attitudinally contemplative, in ‘cross-over’ from extreme left-brain and extreme right-brain engagement – and here he was, the boy always in trouble with various teachers, speaking my as yet unrealized thoughts, and riveting me to that moment.

It was the supreme moment, within the supreme experience in a life-time of teaching, and it was, as Jack Nicholson and the movie title say, ‘As good as it gets’.

One key quotation is missing from this section. It is; “The larger the island of knowledge,the longer the shoreline of mystery.” Anon. I now find that in a piece of his work Bill Viola was inspired by;

“The Self is an ocean without a shore. Gazing upon it has no
beginning or end, in this world and the next.”
Ibn al’Arabi (1165 – 1240)

The ocean and island metaphors, the limitless Self, the fathomless self, the moment and memories, ‘After Life’, self-knowledge and the impossibility of knowing the Self – all these and more are essential threads in my attempt too present in SunWALK a model of what it is to be positively and fully human as well as a model of how education can be intrinsically spiritualizing without the narrow sectarian religion.

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

What if mothers did rule the world?

From QuakerDave we have a post we should all be asking – What if mothers did rule the world?

Funny. Sally Field is getting ripped by the Right because of her “insane ranting” at the Emmys last night. This savaging comes in spite of the fact that what she said (despite Fox’s attempt to censor her) is about as “family values” as you can get. The war-hawkers at Fox had to cut what she said because she had the audacity to mention war in the context of her being (and portraying) somebody’s mother, and Rupert couldn’t ever let that happen:

“This (award) belongs to all the mothers in the world – may they be seen, may their work be valued and raised – and especially to mothers who stand with an open heart and wait — wait for their children to come home – from danger, from harm’s way and from war. I am proud to be one of those women… If mothers ruled the world there would be no (expletive) wars.”

Here’s the question for the day: What if mothers did rule the world? ………………

I would say:

Those that live under terror might then have security.

Those that hunger might be fed.

Those that thirst might have clean water.

Those that long for education and a means to earn a living might be affirmed.

Those that seek justice and a respected place in the human family might be given a place at the human family’s ‘table’.

To read QuakerDave’s answers go HERE

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

Heart-rending testimony of an Afghan woman in Fazal Sheikh’s online book, ‘When Two Bulls Fight the Leg of the Calf is Broken’

Be sure to visit Fazal Sheikh’s on-line HERE

Take a look at the heart-rending testimony of an Afghan woman in ‘Fazal Sheikh’s online book When Two Bulls Fight the Leg of the Calf is Broken’.

Here is a short extract;

‘When our great Islamic revolution succeeded, we thought our day of deliverance had come. Finally we would be free and independent. Afghanistan was released. But once again women were treated as the goat in the game, pulled this way and that by one faction or another. Once again, on all sides, indiscriminate bombing and rocket-attacks, bullets and mines killed Afghan children in their mother’s wombs. We were forced to flee with bare feet and uncovered heads to escape the killing. Some of us fled to foreign countries and became refugees. It should not be forgotten that some of us were forced to flee to Moscow for our safety!

I shall never forget how so many of us spent frightened lonely nights waiting patiently in the front line for a single loaf of bread. How many of us were abducted by armed men from Mujahedin parties in the middle of the day in busy streets. How many of us were raped. How many of us threw themselves from buildings to keep their chastity. How many of us were taken from the scorching refugee camps in Jalalabad to become a commodity for men in neighboring countries. How many widows were forced to sell themselves to feed their families.

Those who have come to power, those with guns, continue to leer at us, to make fun of us, to take pleasure in harassing us. These men who think of themselves as the defenders of our faith, as our fathers and brothers sent to protect us, are the same ones who call us “Honey”. They say: “Don’t come out of your bottle, the flies might touch you.” The flies are the men that rush at you. Others tell us that we are “live wires that must be covered.” It is a pity they don’t recognize us as individuals, as fellow human beings. Over the loudspeakers they announce that years of holy war has simply been to cover Afghan women in Muslim dress.

That, dear brother, dear father and son, I am sure was not the purpose of the holy war……’

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Of course people need water and food but as Maslow pointed out long ago security is a comparably important need.

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NB All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

Perennial Philosophy or Primordial Tradition?: Huston Smith, Aldous Huxley and Ken Wilber – a view by James Baquet

James Baquet has a very interesting site – Take a look at Baquet’s site HERE It has a lot to say about Perennial Philosophy an the Primordial Tradition;

The modern popularity of the term can probably be attributed to the work of Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), who used the three words “The Perennial Philosophy” as the title of his erudite anthology of religious ideas. (See the Table of Contents here.) In defining the Perennial Philosophy in this book, Huxley doesn’t lay out the same four steps I described above; rather, he (fittingly) gives a more “esoteric” definition:

the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; [and] the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being (vii)

(I discuss this definition, and the following one, more thoroughly in my article “This World and That“, in the section subtitled “Two Definitions of the Perennial Philosophy.”)

Closer to my formulation, but still not identical with it, is the definition he gives in his Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (as translated by Prabhavananda and Isherwood):

At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.

First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness–the world of things and animals and men and even gods–is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

(bullets added)

My four points are implicit in his, but I spell them out differently. As described here, they are quite similar, but Huxley’s 2 and 3 are reversed in comparison to mine.

Huston Smith

Huxley died (on the same day as JFK) in 1963. While he was still alive, another, younger, scholar was already making his mark on the “world religions” scene. Huston Smith, now in his late 80s (born 1919), has been both expounding and living the Perennial Philosophy for all of his adult life. (I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Smith speak in 1997, before I went to Japan; someday I’ll post my notes from that afternoon.)

Dr. Smith uses the term “The Primordial Tradition” to discuss what I have been calling the Perennial Philosophy. He believes that, since “perennial” means “at all times,” it neglects the “everywhere” aspect of this philosophy. You can read more about this in this interview. In a nutshell, Dr. Smith says that the Primordial Tradition is both timeless and spaceless as well, “because it was not only always, but everywhere”–echoing Vincent of Lerins. The universe, he says, “fits into the primordial tradition but does not exhaust it. There are reaches beyond the physical.” He says that science is doing a fine job of learning about “the physical reaches of reality,” but that we are in danger of losing sight of the “other regions of reality which continue to exist whether we attend to them or not”–in other words, the “something bigger.”

He also noted that in writing his book The Religions of Man (now published as The World’s Religions), which focuses on what is different in the individual religions, he “became more and more struck by recurrent themes which seemed to surface just time and again like echoes.” Later, in another book entitled Forgotten Truth, he explored these “common denominators that ran through them all.”

Forgotten Truth examines our place in the various levels of the world around us. The modern view, Dr. Smith says, reflects the primordial, in that humans are in the center between a “world above” and a “world below.” Look at this chart, from page 4:

Dr. Smith’s footnote points out these parallels:

Modern=Scientific=Secular

Primordial=Humanistic=Sacred

In the Modern/Scientific/Secular view, humans occupy the “Meso-world,” between the larger (in simple terms, “galactic”) world above and the smaller (“microscopic”) world below. The Modern hierarchy is based on both size and the strength of the binding forces; these are measures of Quantity.

Both of the Primordial models, on the other hand, look to measures of Quality: in the popular notion, happiness or “Euphoria” is highest at the Heavenly level, and lowest in Hell; we on Earth are in between. The more sophisticated, “Reflective” Primordial view sees Being as the source of this hierarchy: the Higher Planes participate in Being in greater amounts; the Lower, in lesser. Again, Euphoria and Being are measures of the Quality, not Quantity, of things, and this emphasis on quality unites the Popular and Reflective worldviews.

This kind of connective thinking, seeing that worldviews have changed but that they are still based on hierarchies of Things Above and Below, will be returned to in the discussion of Neo-Perennialism below. But I offer them here as evidence of Dr. Smith’s deep thinking about how the Elementary idea (in Campbell/Bastian’s term) of Hierarchy has manifested itself various times, and even in different forms to the popular and reflective minds of the same era.

Ken Wilber

Reluctantly leaving Dr. Smith for now, we turn to an even more contemporary thinker, Ken Wilber (born 1949). Best known for his Buddhist and psychological writings, Wilber is also a proponent of Perennial themes. In the heart-rending story of his wife Treya’s battle with cancer, Grace and Grit, Wilber presents a long interview on his “Seven Points of Timeless Wisdom,” conducted by Treya before her death. You can read the full interview here; I will present only the Seven Points themselves:

Spirit exists

Spirit is found within

Most of us don’t realize this Spirit within

There is a way out

The way leads to direct experience of Spirit

This experience marks the end of sin and suffering

Social action and compassion result

Looking again at my Four Points, we see these parallels:

Neo-Perennialism	Wilber
1. There is something bigger than us	1. Spirit* exists 2. Spirit is found within
2. We either are (West) or seem to be (East) separated from it	3. Most of us don’t realize this Spirit within
3. Through various means we can become reunited with it (or realize that we already are)	4. There is a way out 5. The way leads to direct experience of Spirit
4. Once the separation is overcome, we will lead larger, richer, fuller lives	6. This experience marks the end of sin and suffering 7. Social action and compassion result
*Wilber’s use of the word “spirit” leaps ahead and assigns a value to the “something bigger” in a way that my Point 1 does not. Needless to say, that this quality “is found within” is a further elaboration of something I am not yet willing to concede. This will become clearer in my discussion of Neo-Perennialism below.

Again, a reading of the full interview will give you a better idea of Wilber’s thinking.

So this Perennial Philosophy (despite its immense implications) is a fairly simply idea to grasp. It reflects humankind’s universal impulse toward union with something bigger, which has been exercised in myriad ways throughout human existence. With that, I conclude my comments on the Perennial Philosophy itself.

Take a look at a range of materials on Baquet’s site HERE

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NB All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

Key photography quotations toward defining a photographic aesthetic

This is a running list of quotations selected to help me move toward an understanding of my own photographic aesthetic – based on the SunWALK model.

“The camera is an instrument of detection. We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don’t know. ” Lisette Model

The book (Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes) develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum: studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it. Wiki

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. ~Dorothea Lange

A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into. ~Ansel Adams

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. ~Ansel Adams

The camera can photograph thought. ~Dirk Bogarde

I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges. ~William Albert Allard, “The Photographic Essay”

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. ~Ansel Adams

The goal is not to change your subjects, but for the subject to change the photographer. ~Author Unknown

A photograph is memory in the raw. ~Carrie Latet

All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth. ~Richard Avedon

The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth. ~Harold Evans, “Pictures on a Page”

You don’t take a photograph, you make it. ~Ansel Adams

Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure. ~Tony Benn

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety. ~Ansel Adams

I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help. ~Ruth Bernhard

A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone. I don’t think this can be true for photography. Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty. We won’t take an interest in it. ~John Loengard, “Pictures Under Discussion”

I just think it’s important to be direct and honest with people about why you’re photographing them and what you’re doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul. ~Mary Ellen Mark

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man. ~Edward Steichen

The photograph itself doesn’t interest me. I want only to capture a minute part of reality. ~Henri Cartier Bresson

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box. ~Henri Cartier Bresson

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. ~Henri Cartier-Bresson

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera. ~Lewis Hine

A photograph is like the recipe – a memory the finished dish. ~Carrie Latet

Everyone has a photographic memory, but not everyone has film. ~Author Unknown

Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me. ~Sam Abbel

A picture is worth a thousand words; a slide show is both. ~Author Unknown

One photo out of focus is a mistake, ten photo out of focus are an experimentation, one hundred photo out of focus are a style. ~Author Unknown

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it. ~John Berger

I didn’t want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature. ~Wynn Bullock

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be. ~Duane Michals

The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance. ~Ansel Adams

Useful sites

http://www.photoquotes.com/ Blogs on Photography

http://photosleavehome.blogspot.com/2005/03/john-berger-understanding-photograph.html

http://www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/

http://moma.org/collection/depts/photography/index.html

http://www.photo-seminars.com/fame.htm

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NB All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD.

Summaries are HERE

Story and storying: the teacher’s self as text in reform of education

Parker Palmer in, The Courage to Teach, (1998 p.3), says that his book:

explores the teacher’s inner life, but it also raises a question that goes beyond the solitude of the teacher’s soul: How can the teacher’s selfhood become a legitimate topic in education and in our public dialogues on educational reform?

It turns out that this site is an attempt to answer Palmer’s question.

In a similar vein Sondra Perl (1994), (in Laidlaw, Mellett and Whitehead 2003) says:

Stories have mythic powers. To know this … is to know the shaping power of the tale. But how, I wonder, do we see beyond the boundaries of a familiar story and envision a new one? What, in other words, are the connections between texts we read and the lives we live, between composing our stories and composing ourselves?

Stories are one answer to the question; ‘What is it that makes of the parts a whole?’. Story-making of our experience is in-built. Conversely we tend to read the world according to the stories to which we subscribe, or that we ourselves have created. A religious world-view would be an example of the former. Concerning personal stories and how we construe the world see the psychology, and methodology, of George Kelly HERE

I am seeking on this site, and have sought in my thesis, to see beyond the familiar stories of my life, and of education as it is has been, and, through ‘a re-composing’ of my life via autobiography, my teaching and dialogues, I have sought to envision a new story for education. This is what is meant by ‘applied autoethnography’.

Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney; resonance, memory, self-understanding and depths of the soul

Sculpture the ‘Well of Life’, Zagreb – source

I chose the following poem by Seamus Heaney (1996 p.14) as ‘the poem’ for my doctoral thesis because it shows beautifully how we resonate now, in relation to what we sensed and experienced as children. It also shows how, through metaphor, the objective connects with the subjective to thrill, to the very quick of our being.

About the poem, Personal Helicon Pelligrino (2003 p.1) explains;
Mount Helicon is a mountain in Greece, that was, in classical mythology, sacred to Apollo and the Muses. From it flowed two fountains of poetic inspiration. Heaney is here presenting his own source of inspiration, the “dark drop” into personal and cultural memory, made present by the depths of the wells in his childhood. Now, as a man, he is too mature to scramble about on hands and knees, looking into the deep places of the earth, but he has his poetry – and, thank God, so do we.

Of course if Heaney was reading it we would have that wonderful voice, like an aromatic tree giving up the sap, and perfuming the air with all the good things from the soil.

Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney
for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD. Summaries are HERE

Mystical implications of photography

Photo by: Andre Kertesz – source

For some time now I have been interested in how both cinema and photography might be compared to mystical experience. I will post separately re cinema.

One point of comparison lies in how the two see the moment.

In the mystical the moment is seen as out of time – a visit to the eternal present.

In photography the moment is given duration, brought frozen into time – up to a theoretical eternal existence.

Of course a major source of inspiration, in both his photography and his writings, is Henri Cartier-Bresson;

A wonderful retrospective is HERE at Magnum

However in assembling some materials to help articulate a view re photography and the mystical I have discovered some fine materials high amongst which is The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer. Concerning Andre Kertesz, see photo at the top of this post, he says;

What Kertesz sees when he looks out at the street is often this silhouetted representative of his own feelings about being adrift and unappreciated in New York. The people in the streets, heading to shops, are emissaries of his own sadness. That is the lot of the photographer: you walk the streets or sit on a bench – or you look out of the window at people……

Some more wonderful photographs by Andre Kertesz;

TO BE DEVELOPED

You can hear a fascinating interview with Geoff Dyer HERE

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD. Summaries are HERE

Quotations by Tolstoy on ‘What is Art?’

Source

Professor Julie Van Camp placed a large number of quotations by Tolstoy from his What is Art? The first few are presented below. A number of them centre on the relationship between artist, art and ‘receiver’ of the art.

In a previous posting I suggested as a useful definition;

Art is culturally, and personally, significant meaning, skilfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium.
(After a definition by Richard Anderson quoted in Freeland (2001 p. 77))

Adding the ‘and personally’ phrase is vital because there is a vital distinction between the cultural and the personal in an aesthetic experience.

Professor Van Camp includes a list of questions for discussion but I’m wondering if another way of approaching Tolstoy’s thought is to bring into focus the view he appears to have of what it is to be human. Of course many of the implications of what Tolstoy says are what has preoccupied writers about art over the last century but on this site I am suggesting a neo-humanistic form – and such documents as this by Tolstoy can help in such a project.

I don’t have the time to do this at present but I have included some questions, and underlined some of what seem to me to be the key words/phrases in the first few excerpts – to indicate an approach to discovering how Tolstoy was answering the question, “What is it to be fully and positively human?” – in the context of his thinking about the aesthetic.

CHAPTER FIVE (excerpts). . .

#1. In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in this way we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man. (RP Isn’t it pleasurable as well as being intrinsically human?)

#2. Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression. (RP Does it? If so what kind of relationship? Is it different now?)

#3. Speech, transmitting the thoughts and experiences of men, serves as a means of union among them, and art acts in a similar manner. The peculiarity of this latter means of intercourse, distinguishing it from intercourse by means of words, consists in this, that whereas by words a man transmits his thoughts to another, by means of art he transmits his feelings. (RP Doesn’t art deal in ideas as well? Isn’t speech intimately connected with feelings? Is the issue more to do with differences in the respective modes and how they govern perception?)

#4. The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms, and this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and phenomena. (RP Is the accurate ‘re-producibility’ of emotion really a fully satisfactory explanation – when we consider for example contemporary fine art? However empathy and compassion are surely the basis of much movement in art – aren’t they?)

#5. And it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based. (RP Tolstoy seems to assume that we ‘receive’ rather like hearing a radio broadcast. Doesn’t this down-play too much the nature of subjectivity and personal history?)

#6. If a man infects another or others directly, immediately, by his appearance or by the sounds he gives vent to at the very time he experiences the feeling; if he causes another man to yawn when he himself cannot help yawning, or to laugh or cry when he himself is obliged to laugh or cry, or to suffer when he himself is suffering – that does not amount to art. (RP So is the difference that art requires symbolic conventions as well as empathy and compassion?)

#7. Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications. To take the simplest example: a boy, having experienced, let us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and, in order to evoke in others the feeling he has experienced, describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the surroundings, the woods, his own lightheartedness, and then the wolf’s appearance, its movements, the distance between himself and the wolf, etc. All this, if only the boy, when telling the story, again experiences the feelings he had lived through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had experienced is art. If even the boy had not seen a wolf but had frequently been afraid of one, and if, wishing to evoke in others the fear he had felt, he invented an encounter with a wolf and recounted it so as to make his hearers share the feelings he experienced when he feared the world, that also would be art. And just in the same way it is art if a man, having experienced either the fear of suffering or the attraction of enjoyment (whether in reality or in imagination) expresses these feelings on canvas or in marble so that others are infected by them. And it is also art if a man feels or imagines to himself feelings of delight, gladness, sorrow, despair, courage, or despondency and the transition from one to another of these feelings, and expresses these feelings by sounds so that the hearers are infected by them and experience them as they were experienced by the composer. (RP Are the external indications’ conventions including symbolic conventions? Does art sometimes work as directly as immediate compassion and empathy in real life?)

To see the whole list go HERE.

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD. Summaries are HERE

40 Meditation Practices – the Chris Corrigan collection

Source Wiki on Meditation

A certain Chris Corrigan has assembled 40 meditation practices (a few links need re-newing)

Forty meditation practices

40 meditation practices in 4 positions

Walking Meditation

Standing Meditation

Standing Chi Kung: Taoist standing practice
Kyudo (standing zazen) archery
Million dollar qi gong practice: more on the benefits of standing meditation
Wu Ji posture: instructions for standing and guiding awareness
Hapkido breathing exercises for standing meditation
Zhan Zhuang: Instructions for Tai Chi standing meditation
Triple Burner Standing Meditation: More exercises for circulating qi
Zen standing meditation: also with breathing and vocalization methods
Ku meditation club handbook: practices from many spiritual traditions
Standing meditation with a tree

Sitting meditation

Lying meditation

Be sure to visit Chris Corrigan’s amazing collection of stuff HERE

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD. Summaries are HERE

Epiphany, insight via autobiography and ‘autoethnography applied’

Source

In my PhD I used aspects of autobiography including episodes that were epiphanic. By epiphany I here mean;

a. A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something.

b. A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization: “I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash that would change the way I viewed myself” Frank Maier.

I would add to the ‘Frank Mair example above and make it;

“I experienced several epiphanies, that would change the way I viewed education, the world and myself”

The particular episodes in my life I discovered to my surprise had led to the main dimensions of what was to become my model of what it is to be human the ‘I’ (Creative -subjective), the ‘WE’ (Caring – moral) and the ‘IT’ (Criticality-objective) dimension respectively that give us the three ways of engaging with reality. I had moved into autoethnography.

Autoethnography is an established, but still emergent, form of qualitative research. Described by Ellis and Bochner (2000) it is:

an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural. Back and forth autoethnographers gaze, first through an ethnographic wide-angle lens, focussing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations – see Deck, (1990); Neuman, (1996); Reed-Danahay, (1997). As they zoom backward and forward, inward and outward, distinctions between the personal and cultural become blurred, sometimes beyond distinct recognition. Usually written in first-person voice, autoethnography , autoethnographic texts appear in a variety of forms – short stories, poetry, fiction, novels, photographic essays, personal essays, journals, fragmented and layered writing and social science prose. In these texts, concrete action, dialogue, emotion embodiment, spirituality, and self-consciousness are featured, appearing as relational and institutional stories affected by history, social structure, and culture, which themselves are dialectically revealed through action, feeling, thought and language.

This does seem to well describe my intentions, and the way I proceeded. Storying is seen as essential for learners in the model, as well as being present in the autobiographic approach. The legitimacy of the applied dimension lies in the fact that I knew I wanted to present a model before I knew that I/the thesis needed to use the autobiographic – the surprise, for me, was how much they are one and the same.

Action research, focusing down to the autobiographic and the ethnographic, is explicit, or implicit, in the overall process of the SunWALK model per se. In a sense the thesis is the story of the thesis – of its evolution from the dynamic between praxis and reflection and beliefs and values. As White (2002) says action research can increase the likelihood that one’s behaviour is congruent with one’s theories about teaching and learning – and, one hopes, the values with which we choose to identify ourselves.¹

Given that the primary intention was to create a new model of education intention the suggestion was made that this could be called ‘Applied Autoethnography’.

To be developed

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Ideally I would like to see every school and every teacher connected with research and theory-creation, with relevant university departments working as supportive partners to the teachers. The subject of the study was my self, and my teaching, and the aim was self-understanding as well as producing a model of education – such an action research approach in all schools could not only ‘grow’ more effective teaching, but would also deepen and widen the possible communities to which teachers could belong.

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD. Summaries are HERE

What is art? – definitions

Source

What is art?

One definition that works for me is;

Art is culturally significant meaning, skilfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium.

Richard Anderson quoted in Freeland (2001 p. 77)

I would make one change;

Art is culturally, and personally, significant meaning, skilfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium.

There is a whole range of art that I know has cultural meaning but for it to enable an aesthetic experience in me it has also to have personal as well as cultural meaning.

TASKS:Lesson questions

How far, and in what ways, has art , through the dominance of conceptual art, replaced philosophy?

How far, and in what ways, has art replaced religion?

More resources

Extensive quotations from Tolstoy at Professor Julie van Camp’s site are HERE

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD. Summaries are HERE

Story and Personal Myth in making our selves, and our education, whole

My personal myth Island, Shoreline and Ocean –

a view of story in Personal Development and in Holistic Education

Introduction:

By way of an introduction here are a few succinct thoughts. Skip this if you want to go straight to my ‘personal myth’;

Myth operates in us – its part of being human – like philosophizing. Therefore we should make the most of it – in terms of the mythology we make, and that with which we choose to identify.

Story is central to our meaning-making and how we (choose) to make sense of the world and give account of our encounters and experiences.

Myth, as opposed to story generally, is about our deepest concerns and is characterized as narrative that gives account of the unknown and unknowable as well as some of the known. E.g. we die but we don’t know what, if anything, happens after that. Myth creates and is derived from beliefs.

Myth intrapersonally is the clothing we give to the psycho-spiritual dynamics of inner experience.

Myth interpersonally is the stories we tell each other to explain encounters with the (mainly) unknown and unknowable.

Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth is a must because it makes clear the relationship between myth and religion and world-views.

“Without myth, cult, ritual and ethical living, a sense of the sacred dies,” says Armstrong. Without the discipline of mythical thinking and practice, it was difficult for many to avoid despair. The dark epiphanies of the 20th century can be blamed on “the absence of a viable mythology” that could help us face the unspeakable. Guardian review by Tim Radford

A personal myth operates in us whether we choose to articulate it or not. It is closely allied to what one psychologist called ‘our personal script’ and the another (Kelly) called our set of ‘personal constructs’.

We can help in healing ourselves by articulating our personal myth in comparison and contrast to the group myths around us – or that exist as historical artifacts.

Restorying, (e.g.by writing different versions of) our personal myth can enable us to re-frame our personal experience and gain degrees of control and depths of energy that previously were denied us through locked-up pain.

Creating a personal myth can facilitate better self-understanding and there is potentially a powerful tool for teaching and learning.

My personal myth is here;

The ‘Island, Shoreline and Ocean’ personal Myth

The personal myth that follows was written as a ‘one-page’ way of expressing a) a sense of the relationship with the cosmos, the Whole, and b) of a range of the ideas in, and behind, SunWALK. Jane is part of me, perhaps the same Jane as in Jane’s Short Story in Chapter 1.

The personal myth is an attempt at re-storying one kind of knowing. A felt need to undertake a re-storying of knowing can lie in acknowledgement of the fact that we know, and need to know, and need to express that knowing, in more ways than the empirical-reasoning mode – hence Island, Shoreline, Ocean. To admit other ways of knowing, is to admit that in our wholeness we are more than our senses and our reasoning. It is also to admit that in our knowing we are surrounded by mystery, which we encounter. We in various ways give accounts of those encounters.

3:3 Island, Shoreline and Ocean

a personal myth concerning the nature of mystical experience & its relationship to consciousness, & to knowledge creation – as such it is an attempt to include as much as possible of what I learned during the eleven year journey of the thesis – in a ‘one page’ story

The sun always woke her. Every day Jane walked through her garden, inspecting this plant and that, analysing what needed to be done. The quest was never-ending. Sometimes she sat a while on an old tree stump in order to consider the tasks and challenges, trying to work out the feelings and puzzles of what didn’t seem quite right, what didn’t feel quite right. What she couldn’t physically arrange she sometimes tried to paint or write – she had an imaginary garden as well as a real one. Sometimes she looked at her neighbours’ gardens, wondering if that would give her inspiration, but she was always left with the feeling that her most important answers came from elsewhere.

Every day beneath the practical considerations she felt a longing. Having made her review of her garden Jane walked over the fields, across the two streams that eventually made their way down to the sea, and along the cliff, and down to the shoreline. At the shoreline she breathed in her sense of the infinity of the ocean, along with the ozone-heavy, sea-weedy, sea air.
Frequently she imagined the island’s shoreline around the island’s circumference. In her mind’s eye she saw each place being shaped in some different way by the ocean – which was sometimes gentle, and was sometimes awesome in its relentless might. Sometimes the feelings that filled her were so powerful that she was overcome. Sometimes the beauty of being in the presence of the ocean was so great that she felt that neither garden nor painting nor poetry would ever fully satisfy the deepest longing.

Often after such reverie she slipped into the sea.

The sea had so much salt that she just floated. And, when the temperature was right, in floating, eyes closed, she lost all sense of where she ended and where the surrounding sea began. There was no separate sea, no separate self – it was just ….. being. It was always that way, just being. At such times she felt both full and empty, both powerless and at that same time she felt herself to be the very ocean that insistently carved and re-carved the island shoreline.

Mostly at that point she just wanted to stay, to be just part of this place between land and sea, like a driftwood sculpture, ocean-polished, that had been thrown up after a long journey from some river bank, high up some vaguely-remembered river. The shoreline was exquisitely the best of places. But she always took that first step. A first step on the walk back to her garden. And with the walking the experience that was ineffable started to give up insights and possibilities to both refine the garden, and to extend it into some more of the island’s familiar, wilderness, space.

In the evenings she and her friends sat beneath the moon, in whichever was the most interesting of their gardens, at that particular time, and they discussed the issues that concerned them. They all, more or less, had similar such deep experiences as Jane. The ongoing conversation was what united them, along with their respect for how they clothed so differently, in imagination and form, the experiences that were ineffable.
C. from an unpublished doctoral thesis by Roger Prentice, Northumberland ver July 2003

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Karen Armstrong’s book A Short History of Myth is HERE NB Read the Customer Reviews which are excellent and ignore the Editorial Reviews which are carping, mean-spirited and self-serving!

Relevant book that looks interesting Restorying Our Lives: Personal Growth Through Autobiographical Reflection HERE

Island map SOURCE

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD. Summaries are HERE

Postmodernism and Modernism as the Frame and The Mirror

‘Bush faces of the Dead – Source and a PoMo (Postmodern) primer

Postmodernism as the Frame and The Mirror

Further to my previous post re postmodernism I found this useful and stimulating;

“If the postmodern is a collage — as some critics have suggested — or if collage is itself a kernel of the postmodern, what does this mean for our way of understanding the world?” The Frame and the Mirror uses this question to probe the distinctive character of the postmodern situation and the philosophical problem of representation…………

More than an introduction to the postmodern, The Frame and the Mirror advances our understanding of the contemporary world by relating its features to the peculiar characteristics of collage. Ultimately, Brockelman shows how collage demands that we reinterpret modernity, conceiving of it as suspended between a loss of certainty and a new kind of knowledge about the human condition.

In doing so, his work challenges many of the claims made in the name of postmodernism — and offers in their place a new and ironic view of the cultural space in which contemporary and historical events occur.

from a review of The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage & Postmodernism by Thomas P. Brockelman 2001 Northwestern Uni Press

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This is only a fragment from a review but the key idea is that the past ideal was to mirror reality – either external reality as in a landscape or ‘internal reality’ in say the agonized energy of Van Gogh paintings. Now there is much greater consciousness about any ‘frame’ (context) that surrounds an object. Often there is much greater understanding about the ‘who, when, why, for whom, how etc’ of its creation.

In this spirit of postmodernism we can re-contextualize or re-frame anything from the past – for any one of numerous reasons. Reasons might include attacking the current status quo or attacking the status quo at the time of the original objects original creation.

This provides endless opportunities for novelty. We can take anything and re-contextualize it to create endless kaleidoscopic novelty. But do we also need a fixed point, an orientation, a harbour in a sea of change? I believe we do. That is we need a balance between that which is fixed and that which is open to change. But we can’t return to the past. Going back to earlier forms or over-simplified forms (fundamentalist religions) is to duck reality. The only position that can satisfy current challenges is a universalist one that includes a new form of humanism. Yes include the great world religions and philosophies – whatever leads us to be more just, true, good and beautiful. This universalist position above all recognizes oneness and arises from empathy and compassion towards all others of the species. Our humanity is our resistance to endless novelty that without some fixedness will only bring insanity.

The ‘portrait’ of President Bush is a kind of mosaic through artificial pixilation. It is also an astonishing assault on the normal conventions of portraiture as well as carrying its political and anti-war message. The image resonates with meanings and part of that is that it refers to modern digital communication except the ‘pixels’ are themselves the images of the fallen. The portrait itself is re-framed – and it reframes the meaning of this particular portrait.

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Postmodernism at Wiki

Interesting site here on modernism postmodernism and architecture

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All postings to this site relate to the central model in the PhD. Summaries are HERE

Texts and Contexts and the Ultimate context – post-modernism and dinosaurs

All postings, and pages, for this site are seen as texts as in ‘particulars’ or parts. But each post or page is as I will later point out in relation to an ‘ultimate’ context.

The parts or particulars are as in Wilber;

“To understand the whole it is necessary to understand the parts. To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole. Such is the circle of understanding.

We move from part to whole and back again, and in that dance of comprehension, in that amazing circle of understanding we come alive to meaning, to value, and to vision: the very circle of understanding guides our way, weaving together the pieces, healing the fractures, mending the torn and fractured fragments, lighting the way ahead – this extraordinary movement from part to whole and back again, with healing the hallmark of every step, and grace the tender reward.” Eye of Spirit; an integral vision for a world gone slightly mad by Ken Wilber (1997) pub. Shambhala p.1.

Handling more and more challenging texts is one way to think of progress in education.

One aspect of post-modernism is the attention paid to con-texts. Literally con-text = what (meaning) comes with the text. A whole bunch of questions then become vital for examining the the text in one or more contexts. For example who wrote it or made it and for whom – and why, with what reward, what pressures etc.

One key variable then for the teacher is how s/he emphasizes (or de-emphasizes) contexts as s/he conducts discourse with the class.

I always felt that historical contexts were less important than how a text helps us right now- the group – in informing our selves more deeply concerning, ‘What it is to be positively and fully human’.

One source of novelty in post-modernist art is to re-contextualize objects – literally to give them a new framework. A friend got her first-class honours degree for – amongst other pieces of work – taking a reproduction of an old master and tucking under the arm of a central figure a baby dinosaur.

The most memorable teaching of my life was with a group 12-13 year olds when discussing the shortest story in the world, “When I woke up the dinosaur was still there.” All the drive and creativity was in construction of possible contexts as well as discussing whether or not it constitute a ‘story’ in any meaningful way. In due course I will post sections of the video of the ‘story lesson’.

Schools and teachers should provide experiences that help with developing a sense of the Whole and not just the ‘hell of relativity’ when the world is presented as just endless bits.

The ultimate context that we are all in, in reading all of the texts that come our way, is one of mystery, of not knowing. When we accept that we can enjoy both the concepts of separation and duality and the amazement of laying down the burden of self in an experience of unity- as in Heschel’s;

“The world presents itself in two ways to me. The world as a thing I own, the world as a mystery I face. What I own is a trifle, what I face is sublime. I am careful not to waste what I own; I must learn not to miss what I face. We manipulate what is available on the surface of the world; we must also stand in awe before the mystery of the world. We objectify Being but we also are present at Being in wonder, in radical amazement.” A. J Heschel

Peter Ustinov makes the point in a different way; “We are united by our doubts and divided by our convictions.”

Our encounters with the Whole are part of the personal story (history or her-story) that we make up to explain the cosmos. We should all write our ‘personal myth’ at some stage. As an example I will post mine separately.

In the light of the above comments I have added this to the front page of the site;

CONTEXTUAL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

3 Questions and suggested answers that provide the context for all posts and pages on these sites

—–0—–

Q 1) “What is it to be positively & fully human?” = the most important of all questions. My answers are in 2 and 3 below.

—–0—–

Q 2) “What is it to function holistically?” My answer =

“To proceed in all particulars with a sense of the whole.”

Two quotations that are key to understanding. Firstly Jung’s,

“The utterances of the heart— unlike those of the discriminating intellect— always relate to the whole.”

Secondly Heschel’s;

“Concepts are delicious snacks with which we try to alleviate our amazement.”

—–0—–

Q 3) How in one sentence does my PhD answer the question, “How should we educate to create a paradigm shift in education?”

—–0—–

The SunWALK model of spiritualizing (or humanizing) pedagogy sees human education as:

the storied development of meaning, which is

constructed, and de-constructed,

physically, mentally and spiritually, through

Wise & Willing Action, via

Loving and Knowing – developed in

Community, through the

‘Dialectical Spiritualization’ of

Caring, Creativity & Criticality processes, all undertaken in the light of the

‘Sun’ of chosen higher-order values and beliefs, using

best available, appropriate content.

NB Please see these 3 questions, and suggested answers, as the context for all postings and pages on these sites.

The diagram that pulls everything together

Summaries of SunWALK model are HERE

—–0—–

Gandhi, certainty and the ‘Healthy Doubt’ – as the basis for ‘federating’ common ground

Whatever our religious background we tend to say something equivalent to, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’. This is an assertion of certainty. For some of us strength of certainty is an indicator of the quality of faith. Unfortunately, to take an extreme example, unconditioned certainty can lead to unspeakable horrors – the Nazis were certain that their killing of millions was a right and proper thing to do. So is a smidgen of doubt, the cousin of humility? And might it also be that such a conditioner of faith as a ‘healthy doubt’ hold us back from continuously negating ‘the other’.

I’m also suggesting that water-tight, hermetically-sealed certainty might put a break on an individual’s willingness to recognize the essential sameness in all of the world’s great faiths. Why can’t we be one? Well because we think our path up the mountain is the only right one – and because we are familiar and comfortable with it.

I can only think of three possible solutions. Firstly we all become Baha’is, Unitarians or or some form of Universalist worldview. Secondly we all wait to see which religion dominates and then hop on board (a time-honoured method but not out of Morality’s top drawer). Thirdly we take a leaf out of Ghandi’s book and expand our heart and consciousness so that we can revere our own tradition and the inner essence of all of the other great world religions.

Gandhi said;

I came to the conclusion long ago … that all religions were true and also that all had some error in them, and whilst I hold by my own, I should hold others as dear as Hinduism. So we can only pray, if we are Hindus, not that a Christian should become a Hindu … But our innermost prayer should be a Hindu should be a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim, a Christian a better Christian. (Young India: January 19, 1928)

This is interesting because it suggests that we can have a universal heart that works from within the particular. Is that possible? Is it only possible for a few? Whether or not we go with Ghandi ‘s ‘particular-to-the-universal way we need to break through from narrow-mindedness and close-heartedness. To be able to cherish both the particular culture into which we were born and have a heart that embraces the inner light of all of the great world religions seems to me to make sense – just as federalism makes sense in say America or Germany.

There are some other of Ghandi’s thoughts that are relevant to the view expressed here;

God has no religion

My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines. To assent to such a doctrine is for me a denial of God.

We must respect other religions, even as we respect our own. Mere tolerance thereof is not enough.

A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.

(When asked if he was a Hindu) Yes I am, I am also a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, and a Jew.

“The sayings of Muhammed are a treasure of wisdom not only for Muslims but for all of mankind.”

The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives. Source WikiQuotes

If we can’t quite yet expand our consciousness to recognizing the inner oneness of all of the great faiths at least the Golden Rule (separate postings) is an ethic through which we can start to clear a meeting place within the forest of beliefs.

It is only beliefs that prevent the realization of our oneness. And it is only realization of oneness that will enable us to overcome our current ‘hardening of the hearteries’. That ‘hardening of the hearteries’ = beliefs so narrowed as to prevent us seeing ourselves reflected in the eyes of the ‘other’.

From ‘Summer is a-coming in’ (1250) to ‘Cummin Thru Ya Fuckin Block’ (1994); each generation’s popular song lyrics – for cultural exploration

Source – and lyrics for the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

From SUmair is IcUmin in (1250) to Cummin Thru Ya Fuckin Block (1994); each generation’s popular song lyrics – for cultural exploration of values and beliefs

Great song lyrics are inspiring. Of course when they are coupled with great music the two have a multiplier effect and become ‘transcendent’. Why? How do the words when combined with the music become so powerful – so powerful that they can ‘take us out of ourselves’ and transport us delightfully?

Once or twice I’ve heard teachers and/or preachers refer to lyrics in popular song and I’m sure a lot of work has been done in schools and colleges. Here I just post one or two ideas and hope that I get to hear about more such work.

I did look many many years ago at some of the lyrics used by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan with secondary school pupils in the context of teaching English in the first school in which I taught. (I’m afraid I am one of those who thought that Bob Dylan did fall from grace with the electric guitar – but no one can take away the diamond-like clarity and poetry of his early work!) Still good stuff!

If you can avoid too much initial resistance folk song is, of course, a very interesting vehicle to look at historical events and work-related and class and geographic issues.

One of the earliest songs is SUmair is IcUmin in (c.1250)

SUmair is IcUmin in, lU-duh sing cUckU
GrOweth sAd and blOweth mAd and springth the wUduh nU
ow-uh blAteth after lahhhmb, lOth after cal-vuh cU
Bullock stairteth, buck-uh vairteth, mUrI sing cUckU
Well singst thU cUckU; nA swick thU nevair nU
Sing cUckU, nU….

Translation:
Summer is coming in, loudly sings the cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo….
The seed grows; the meadow blossoms, and the woods alivens anew.
The ewe bleats after the lamb; the cow lows after the calf;
The bull leaps; the goat capers*; merrily sing cuckoo!
Well sing you, cuckoo–don’t ever stop now.
Sing cuckoo, now….

Hear the music HERE

Lastly I want to mention films – probably like me you are astonished in having watched a film to see that it had used 30 or so songs and yet you were not aware of them – so looking at the use of popular music in films is another very interesting area.

TASK/LESSONs – a few ideas

1 Look at some lyrics that stand up as poetry and some that don’t but get transformed when coupled with the music.

2 Explore the multiplier effect’ when lyrics and song come together – via a good/great singer.

3 Use song lyrics (and photographs/photography) in ‘reminiscence work’ with senior citizens and multi-generational work.

4 Explore why each generation gets attached to and is defined by (?) the songs that are popular.

5 what are the down-sides of music in films? What part does music play in ‘Hollywood’ type movies?

6 Watch some key/favourite/ important sections of films with and without the music sound-track – what’s the difference and what’s going on?

7 Cows are said to like music – why. If its true and what is known about music in the work-place?

8 Get children to interview parents grand-parents about key music in relation to key events in their lives.

9 Get children to develop a set of images in relations to a particular song that is important to them e.g. Strange Fruit

HERE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVOURITE LYRICS AND EDUCATIONAL SOURCES FOR THEM

Every time we say good bye (Cole Porter)

We love each other so deeply
that I ask you this, sweetheart,
why should we quarrel ever,
why can’t we be enough clever,
never to part.
Ev’ry time we say goodbye
I die a little,
ev’ry time we say goodbye
I wonder why a little,
why the gods above me
who must be in the know
think so little of me
they allow you to go.
When you’re near
there’s such an air
of spring about it,
I can hear a lark somewhere
begin to sing about it,
there’s no love song finer,
but how strange the change
from major to minor…
ev’ry time we say goodbye.
Ev’ry time we say goodbye
I die a little,
ev’ry time we say goodbye
I wonder why a little,
why the gods above me
who must be in the know
think so little of me
they allow you to go.
When you’re near
there’s such an air
of spring about it,
I can hear a lark somewhere
begin to sing about it,
there’s no love song finer,
but how strange the change
from major to minor…
ev’ry time we say goodbye.
Ev’ry single time
we say goodbye

Source

Miss Otis Regrets
“Oh, hi! A-heh heh! Is Miss Otis in?”
“Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today.”

Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today, madam.
Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today, mmmmmm.
And she’s sorry to be delayed,
but last evening down at lover’s lane
she strayed, madam.
Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today.

When she woke up and found
that her dream of love was gone, madam,
she ran to the man
who had lead her so far astray.
And from under her velvet gown
she drew a gun and shot her lover down, madam.
Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today.

When the mob came and got her
and dragged her from the jail, madam,
they strung her up
on the willow across the way.
And the moment before she died
she lifted up her lovely head and cried, madam.
Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch.
Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today.

Source

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Source

All the things You Are

You are the promised breath of springtime
That makes the lonely winter seem long
You are the breathless hush of evening
That trembles on the brink of a lovely song
You are the angel glow that lights the stars
The dearest thing I know are what you are
Someday my happy arms will hold you
And some day I’ll know that moment divine
When all the things you are, are mine

Source

There is a very funny (and strangely moving) version of All the Things You Are by Peter Sellers – you can hear a bit HERE

Of course neither have the lyric and romantic charm and transcendental sweetness of Cummin Thru Ya Fuckin Block;

Author/Artist/Singer: Artifacts

Music Title/Track: Cummin Thru Ya Fuckin Block

Theme ID: 31545

N/A

featuring RedmanTo the beat y’all
*rat-a-tat drumming sound*[all] Make it funky (4X)
[Red] My nigga Tame [all] makes it funky
[Red] My nigga El [all] makes it funky
[Red] Redman [all] makes it funky
[Red] Huh, check it outVerse One: El Da SensaiI Ego Trip like Ultramag, sag my Girbauds I drag
competition so listen and raise the white flag
Cause the instructor, of the New Jerz verse dusts
another motherfucker I discover what no other brother
can do, hard to handle and to, stamp
I play Tramp like Grace Jones in that movie Vamp
I’m fit to wreck shit, I dip into the skit
Spit lyrics exquisite, blitted as I hit it
I suppose I knows the ways of the pros
Bros be like, “Oh that nigga’s got mad flows”
Creep’ll get it deep, I got it when it’s strict against
ducks who suck, and didn’t have the best defense
I make shit nice, defies with my device
And if I’m in a rap fight, you can catch a cap, right
Bust it, whassup what did ya ask me?
Crafty with my sassafrass P-Funk, thought been handy
Dandy Mayor Ave., back in the lab create my trap
Dibble dabble in the midst of the Artifact we have
swiftness, I blitz, specific and you dig it
from N.J., the Notty Headed Terror and da SensaiChorus: Artifacts, Redman

Pump! Pump! We’re lickin off the mad shots
[Red] It’s the Artifacts and Redman cummin thru ya fuckin block
(repeat 3X)
Pump! Pump! We’re lickin off the mad shots
[Red] It’s the Artifacts and Redman cummin thru ya fuckin!!

Verse Two: Tame One

Well I come live from the Artifact exhibit as a misfit
Larger than Jurassic Park I lick off like Wilson Pickett
Drama like a talk show I hit more cheese than nacho
Feelin Machu when I Pi on; a Coltrane like Roscoe
Hostile underground fossil, nigga bout to rock ya
So peep it how I freak it check the technique yeah I rock ya
I glide like drips and blaze a trail like I was Portland
When ill stressed, I still rock a vest like Ed Norton
The ill king, taking all things cash, crash, and asses
Backstage passes, V.I.P. all access
I got the props pon cock, fuck the know-nots
Whose techniques are weaker than the graphics for the Gobots
I rock with raw steel like Sue Richards, when Rick smacks her
Up motherfuck that I got more funk than muskrats
With my hocus pocus I can fuck up where ya focus
wit my left hook, dip right jab shuffle I can smoke ya
it don’t matter, cause all my shit is fatter than the
pads on MPC-60’s, hit me you got five second to jet G
Straight from the Bricks, now back to the N.J.
The Notty Headed Nigga and da motherfuckin Sensai

[Red] Hoooaaaahhh! One two, one two, one two
This is for Jersey, haha ahh, ah hah
One two, one two

Verse Three: Tame One, MC El

I’m the black king, quick to grease my naps with Royal Crown
and aloe vera representin for the Notty Headed nigga era
However whatever my Posse Packs the Pistols
and my Skwad got the Boom, rid the room, get the bitches

The exact Artifact, who is that, you speak of
Leak my speakers, unique and freakin beats track in fact
I be dat, nigga who you look for, in your worst fears
Peace to my nigga Lord Sear and Samere
Display, niggaz from N.J.
Notty Headed Terror and da motherfuckin Sensai

Outro: Artifacts, Redman

Pump! Pump! We’re lickin off the mad shots
[Red] It’s that Notty Headed Nigga cummin thru ya fuckin block
Pump! Pump! We’re lickin off the mad shots
[Red] It’s the Artifacts and Redman cummin thru ya fuckin block
Pump! Pump! We’re lickin off the mad shots
[Red] Big up to Boom Skwad’s cummin thru ya fuckin block
Pump! Pump! We’re lickin off the mad shots
[Red] It’s the Artifacts and Redman cummin thru ya fuckin block
Pump! Pump!
[Red] Booyaka
Pump! Pump! (6X)
[Red] For nine-fo’
Pump! Pump!
[Red] Artifacts get dapped like that y’all
*sound of rat-a-tat drumming again*
[Red] Jersey’s in the fuckin house y’all
New York’s live in the house y’all
Newark is live in the house y’all
E-O’s live in the house y’all
Word is bond in the hizouse y’all
I’m in the motherfuckin hizouse y’all
So niggaz get the fuckin balls y’all

Source

Endpoint

Question: If ‘sewage’ is the spiritual food of choice how precisely did we fail to develop the appetite for the sublime?

In parenting we go from almost total control to indirect influence. Intrinsic worth, value, meaning, taste, discrimination are the kinds of qualities most of us hope our children acquire. In this process we have to stay conscious of the fact that if we don’t have (a reasonable degree of) control over our children’s environment someone far less benign will be manipulating them.

‘I am what I eat; Salads, Soups, Sikhism, and Harmony in Diversity – starting with our children

Discovering the site ‘gateway to Sikhism‘ was one of today’s pleasures.

Discovering the 100+ recipes was also a pleasure and set me thinking.

I’ve heard that one of the last elements of group culture to go in the process of assimilation is food.

Food and harmony in diversity seem connected in many ways.

Firstly of course who in their right mind wants assimilation – of themselves or others. As the (wo)man said, “I want salads not soup” – that was on the question of diversity and its harmony! However what is needed is an understanding of the harmony that can help the diversity flourish. That’s what is in short supply. Perennial Philosophy and a universalist worldview is one way forward. Perhaps this doesn’t require leaving our own culture and religious roots – (although the Baha’is would say, “Yes it does – and that is the ultimate of act of allegiance.”). Gandhi had something interesting to say about this;

“After long study and experience, I have come to the conclusion that [1] all religions are true; [2] all religions have some error in them; [3] all religions are almost as dear to me as my own Hinduism, in as much as all human beings should be as dear to one as one’s own close relatives. My own veneration for other faiths is the same as that for my own faith; therefore no thought of conversion is possible.” (M. K. Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers: Life and Thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi as told in his own words, Paris, UNESCO 1958, p 60.)

He also said, I’m given to understand, “God has no religion.”

Secondly food is one of the great universals – it demonstrates universality in the fact that we all need, and most love it, and its diversity is astonishing!

Thirdly many of us enjoy (too much?) eating our way into other cultures. I’ve not (yet) visited Japan but we had a meal in a new a Japanese restaurant in Brighton (England). Of course we need to go further so that we can touch some other parts of the essential reality of other cultures. In doing so we need to sense both that which is distinctive and that which is universal.

Some of the many cultural and sacred connections between food and culture and ‘acting-in-the-world’ can be seen in the Sikh Langar

Through food we can also celebrate our sense of ‘world citizenship’. I’m not only defined by what I think, or that with which I ‘link’ as the wit said, but also by the cuisines I celebrate!

Our giving and receiving food is of course the continuation of the ancient practice of neighbourliness. Today we can extend this to distant people through giving via charities.

Many years ago a Roman Catholic school I taught in would celebrate another religion’s festival in the morning assembly. Divali and Just as enjoyable – one of the teachers organized that those children would bring in a ‘pot luck’ of ‘Indian’ food. Now for many of the children this was a memorable kind of experiential education!

With our children and our neighbours, near and distant, let’s reach out and break bread – or mix rice – even more!

Jane’s Short Story; teaching children ‘nowness’ in creative writing and photography

Source

In the unpublished doctoral thesis, from which this piece and Jane’s Short Story, is largely taken, the range of concerns include ‘the perpetuation in the present of early experience’. I’m interested to discover that one definition of ‘nowness’ is presentness: the quality of being the present; “a study of the pastness of the present and…of the presentness of the past”.

I wrote Jane’s Short Story to see what a Year 7 class (11 – 12 year olds in the UK) could ‘handle’, but it has become a major piece for teaching me, as well as for teaching others.

Jane’s short story (line numbers are simply to help in discussion)

1 “Come to mummy Jane. Come on, yes, you can do it.” Ste…steppp…stagger step..step got there BIGKISSmmmms’nice. Her mother’s nose stroked back and forth across her neck, as giggles of delight and laughter bubbled from Jane.
“Jane pay attention otherwise you’ll be asking me what the work is in five minutes time.”
5 (’Oh no I won’t Mr Moaner, I know perfectly well what you’re asking – so stop picking on me!’)
“Images Jane, images.”
Tulips. Gigantic red tulips, opened a bit beyond their best, and bigger than any red thing and redder than any red thing and she crawled to grasp, to know the greenness of the green cool green stems and embrace them and lose herself in the redness that was ……..
10 “I want you all to pay attention to the structure of your story……..”
How could she tell her mother that she never felt safe after he left. Only in his hugs with the smell of him did she ever, could she ever, feel safe. She chewed over this and poured herself another bowl of corn-flakes, sensing school time getting nearer and nearer. Her mother had left without giving the bus fare.
Yet again Jane’s leg itched from the nylon thread in the seam of her skirt.
15 She grasped the chair to ease her leg away from the itch, only to put her fingers under her chair and into some freshly placed chewing-gum. “Ugh! Boys are so disgusting!”
“Thank you Jane. I’m not sure what that has to do with careful control of your narrative but I suppose we should be grateful that at least you’ve re-visited our world, even though the visit will no doubt be brief. The trouble with you Jane is that you don’t use the possibilities and talent you have.”
20 Endless possibilities. The muddy brown wet sand, miles and miles of it. She sensed freedoms beyond the edge of her imagination, she would be all creation itself.
“Put your hat on Jane and come here – you’re not going in the sun until I put some cream on you.” Jane submitted to the sun-cream and enjoyed it but also remembered the tug of the harness around her shoulders – tug tug, with her running but not going anywhere.
25 “……and do try to put some images into your writing – do make it come alive.”
The finch, with feathers going in directions they shouldn’t, struggled on its side. The broken leg would not need mending because the shock was already killing the tiny creature. Jane hated the cat with an acid and granite hatred.
“You have ten minutes to finish your story.”
30 Jane sat back on her rump and examined her mother’s radiant face.
She spat out the tulip petals as her sadness entered her.
She was as rigid as the door he had slammed behind him.
She willed the incoming tide to consume her castle and leave only empty sands.
The finch stopped its fluttering and took on the stillness of death.
35 Jane wrote some lines.
Jane felt the tug tug of the harness and struggled to go somewhere.

—–0—–

Jane is, substantially, but not wholly, me. It was an attempt to make the feminine side of my soul ‘walk and talk’

In writing the story I reached back down to early memories with which to ‘clothe’ some of the levels in the streams of consciousness.

In continuing to work with children, or adults, I still sometimes use Jane’s Short Story – as a way to encourage others to create their own stories, made from their own real, and imagined, experience. I discovered how powerful it is if PFC (Philosophy for Children), and creative task-setting, are combined/interwoven – so much so that I believe that the two, when harnessed, together create something akin to ‘exponential development’ i.e the most powerful form of transformative learning. It is still a joy, and a learning experience, when children make their own creations walk and talk, sing and shout, just as Jane became ‘real’ to me, some 9 or 10 years earlier. From time to time I revisit the story and change a few words. Once I also gave it to the same class on succeeding years and asked them to see what they could see compared to their ‘reading’ of the previous year – and to say what differences they felt between the two readings. On the success of this I think that it is worth doing something similar with every class, i.e. for them to re-visit a piece two years running. What they are looking at, with each re-visiting, is, in part, the growth they have had via another year’s experience – a very useful exercise in meta-cognition for the children.

Although it was written when I was in my early fifties I include the story here because it encapsulates some of how autobiography is expressed in even the most creative, or the most abstract, of our work. The story was written in a ‘stream of consciousness’ style to see how well my classes could be at deconstructing the text. It was written in my second year of doing PFC. Sometimes I use it just as a text, sometimes the classes go on to write their own episodes from Jane’s life.

My experience is that children in Year 7 or 8 take a little time to decode the levels in the ‘stream of consciousness’ but then respond most sensitively to the possibilities that exist in and around the story. It seems to work at quite a deep level for some, and very few, except perhaps in initial perplexity, reject the story. It also helps to teach them that story, in its different kinds of truth, can combine re-collected personal experience and meld it with imaginative material. It can be a minor revelation for children who see ‘story is story’ and ‘real life = the truth.

Jane, both as part of my spirit and personal history, and as an independent spirit, has continued to exist, but she has also been transmogrified into the creations of other authors, adults as well as children. It is Jane in the personal myth called Island Shoreline Ocean, presented at the beginning of Chapter 3. My (our) past is re-presented and it is continuously transmogrified, in further re-representations. Each of us re-experiences what we are, as we engage or re-engage, with our beliefs, values, attitudes memories and new experiences. We echo past experiences in each new experience, even when we are seeking to help others in their creativity. Jane’s short story lives on in me as a crystallization of the feelings and images deep in my soul, deep, one might say, in my ‘present’. It has generated versions from 11 – 12 year olds, but also from an 84 year old man who, on one of my courses, wrote the first story he had ever written in his life. (He was pleased and amazed; I was deeply moved by his openness and courage!)

TASK/SUGGESTED LESSONS: It would be fascinating to combine the ideas above with photography!

Great photography blog HERE

Clash of Two Cultures?

Source

In her interesting article All Roads Lead to India Kathleen Raine, on the Resurgence website, quotes the following;

CLASH OF TWO CULTURES

You live in time; we live in space.
You’re always on the move; we’re always at rest.
Religion is our first love; we revel in metaphysics. Science is your passion; you delight in physics.
You believe in freedom of speech; you strive for articulation. We believe in freedom of silence; we lapse into meditation.
Self- assertiveness is the key to your success; self-abnegation is the secret of our survival.
You’re urged every day to want more and more; we’re taught from the cradle to want less and less.
Joie de vivre is your ideal; conquest of desires is our goal.
In the sunset years of life you retire to enjoy the fruits of your labour; we renounce the world and prepare ourselves for the hereafter.
– Hari Dam

———-0———–

LESSON TASKS: How far and it what ways is the contrasting useful? How far do we think the contrasts are true? What claims could be made to reverse the implied speaker for each statement? Is there a speed of globalisation that will inevitably prevent the good of an older culture from being taken forward? Is the work of ‘integral theory’ writers such as Ken Wilber vital to the need to keep hold of the best of the past – all of our pasts? How can we in education help popularize integral theory?

What does the art work above say about East and West? How would you present visually ‘East and West’?

Ugly women rejoice – Salem witches might be forgiven! – great history site for helping teach Arthur Miller’s The Crucible

If you are at all fascinated by our forefathers’ ignorance and cruelty or are about to teach lessons on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – or more recent American history – check out Margaret Odrowaz-Sypniewski’s astonishing sites.

Below are a few snippets that might want to make you visit. The two that leap out for me are;

1 Canon law stated that after the death of a witch, that the accuser and judge might divide his/her property between them.

2 Witchcraft in Massachusetts singled out:

* spinsters [unmarried beyond the usual age of marriage]
* barren women
* the ugly
* the extremely successful
* the independent
* the reclusive
* the litigious [prone to lawsuits]
* the willful.

So would that include ‘fat cats’, lawyers and talentless air-head celebrities (just joking! RP)

Some more extracts

Puritans landed in Massachusetts in December in 1620, during the reign of James I of England, while they were trying to reach the Virginia Colony. A storm at sea directed them north.

Since many people could not afford the price of passage to the American colonies, they indentured themselves to the ship’s captain or another colonist. It usually took five to seven years to pay the money used for passage to the New World. After this time was up, their masters were required to provide their indentured servants with farm tools, seed to grow their own crops, and other essentials they needed to make it on their own.

By 1630 the population of Massachusetts was around 2,000 people. It was then that Governor John Winthrop would begin his first term of office. The Massachusetts Bay Colony would not have a royal standing until May 12, 1686. Most women had as many as twenty-five (25) pregnancies in their life. Families generally consisted of twenty-five people including grandparents, parents, children and their wives. The average life expectancy was forty-five years of age. There were many that lived into their nineties, while children were at the greatest risk during the first years of their lives. Pregnant women were at high risk of dying in childbirth. Most women had to work before and after the birth of their children because the early colonial times were hard and everyone had to work long and difficult hours to survive.

Dying was a regular part of life. Mortality rates were as high as 75% in the early years. Most Puritans were Calvinists. Presbyterians were the model for English Calvinists.

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The Witches of Salem were hanged. This was less painful than the burning of witches in Europe. They thought the burning of a witch was the only way to release the evil, since the Devil would be forced to exit the melting body through the smoke.

Witchcraft in Massachusetts singled out:

* spinsters [unmarried beyond the usual age of marriage]
* barren women
* the ugly
* the extremely successful
* the independent
* the reclusive
* the litigious [prone to lawsuits]
* the willful.

In New England, no one that confessed was put to death. Those who denied the accusations and fought to clear their names were hanged. The first victim of witchcraft, in New England, was Margaret Jones of Charlestown, Massashusetts. Margaret was hanged, in 1648, for giving herbal cures. Margaret was a physician and some thought she had the “malignant touch” after some of her patients started vomiting or suffered violent seizures. Prison guards testified that they saw a small child run out of the witch’s cell into another room, and then vanished. This was enough to prove that she was under the influence of evil. Anne Hibbons, the sister of the Deputy Governor Bellingham of Massachusetts was hanged, in the words of John Norton for “having more wit that her neighbors” (Buckland, 402-411). Anne’s husband died in 1654. He was a Boston merchant, a Colonial Agent, and an assistant Agent. She was “quarrelsome,” and had “supernatural” knowledge. She was accused in 1655, and was executed in 1656.

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The year 2002 marked the 310th anniversary of the witchcraft hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts. In October of 2004, Stanley Usovicz, mayor of Salem, MA. said that he is considering pardoning those persecuted during the seaport town’s infamous 17th century witch trials” (Judith Kane, 19). He said the the 315th anniversary, in 2007, would be a good time to put pardons into effect.

Eighty-one Scottish witches were pardoned, in 2004, in Prestonpans. Most witches were convicted on the basis of spectral evidence [ghosts, apparitions, and other objects of dread) or evil spirits or voices were heard. The Prestonpans, a seaside resort in Scotland, east of Edinburgh, pardoned all “witches” were convicted, including the cats that were burned along with their owners.

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SEE on page http://www.angelfire.com/mi4/polcrt/WitchHistory.html

Canon law stated that after the death of a witch, that the accuser and judge might divide his/her property between them.

Europe had witchcraft trials for 150 years and the death toll ran into the millions:

Malleus Meleficarum [The Hammer of Witches) was written in 1486 by two German Dominican Inquisitors named Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer. Sprender and Kramer concocted strategies for the use of torture and lies. They planned to torture and then offer freedom to those that would help in the discovery and conviction of other witches. They searched for a “Witches’ Mark” on the body of their suspects. A birthmark, wart, or mole might be seen as a “Witches’ Mark.” After the first witch betrayed other “witches,” they were killed. The thought being that they cunningly turned on thier own kind, simply to save themselves, thus were wicked and deceptive.

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http://www.angelfire.com/mi4/polcrt/SalemTrials.html

These sites are just a fragment of the astonishing array created by Margaret Odrowaz-Sypniewski and her husband.

Author/Artist/Singer:	Artifacts
Music Title/Track:	Cummin Thru Ya Fuckin Block
Theme ID:	31545
	N/A

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Forty meditation practices

40 meditation practices in 4 positions

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