Category: Friendship

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-logo

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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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SEE ALSO these allied blogs ––

 Human-centred courses –

 Dictionary of Concepts

Home is HERE i.e. my ‘meta-blog’ -The ´1000 ways …of Celebrating the human spirit

 

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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

 

Being human – an American high school principal´s view

Many years ago a copy of this letter came my way – supposedly issued by a high school principal to his/her teachers on the first day of school.

It was seminal in the development of my world-view  – and it is worthy of re-circulation;

Dear Teacher

     I am a survivor of a concentration camp.  My eyes saw what no man should witness:

        Gas chambers built by learned engineers.

        Children poisoned by educated physicians.

        Infants killed by trained nurses.

        Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.

        So, I am suspicious of education.

My request is: Help your students become human.  Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmans.

Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human. 

SEE ALSO: http://www.hmh.org/ed_faqs.asp

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

De-mystifying the mystical and deciding on your definition of ‘mystical’?

What’s your definition of mystical and mystical experience? The one I came up with is as follows;

‘The mystical is positive, ineffable, unitive, experience that enhances insight or knowing – in a spiritual or religious context.’ (My composite definition to use with Hick’s definition below)

This is a composite developed from a range of authorities I looked at. In addition to developing a definition that works for me I want to de-mystify the mystical. Many mystics are presented as rare creatures but I wanted to emphasize that mystical experience is part of everyday life – like philosophizing. There are neutral and even negative such experiences. The essential thing is the experience of being at one with the Whole and losing what Wilber and others call our ego-boundaries of self (ego).

Positive such experiences provide us with deeper insights into reality and the will to do good in the world. This may or may not be in a religious context.

Neutral or negative such experiences – I will leave it to you to decise which is which – include sex, drugs and rock and roll and such experiences as are available via flotation tanks. Music must surely be included.

What proof is there that such experience is part of normality? Perhaps there are clues in everyday language such as the phrase, “It took me out of myself?” or “I was transported…” (rather more 19thC).

I think that the ‘rarification’ of such people as mystics can be part of how a power elite has in the past exerted power over the common people. Fundamentalists are wary of mystics because they might have a view that’s different to the ‘party line’.

Apparently mystics flowered only for a short time in England.

Of course submitting your own experiences to reason and reasonableness helps create a balance.

My slightly adapted ‘John Hick’s definition’ of the mystical is helpful – the mystical is nothing more or less than direct religious experience’. It’s especially useful if combined with the Christian idea that you will ‘know them by their fruits’

The point is the mystical is subjective. We might be self-deceiving – so its a good idea to have some teachers whose ‘living of the life’ and creating of ‘good fruit’ qualifies them to be seen as authorities.

The bottom line is beliefs matter less that action – so why vilify or kill those whose only difference is that they might hold different beliefs?

Of course – but there’s a sting in the tail – there’s room in my world for fundamentalists, but there’s no room in their world for me. Hmm……..

Addendum

” Mystical experience…..does not seem to me to be anything other than first-hand religious experience as such. This is, however, the core of religion.

…the explanatory function of religion is secondary and derivative. Religion consists primarily in experiencing our life in its relation to the Transcendent and living on the basis of that experience….

…..in terms of Ninian Smart’s six-dimensional analysis – distinguishing the

ritual,

mythological,

doctrinal,

ethical,

social and

experiential dimensions of religion

– mysticism is a general name for religious experience together with part at least of the network of religious practices which support it.

…. Brother David (Steindl-Rast) defined mysticism as “experience of communion with the source of meaning“; and he stressed that all who worship, and indeed all who are conscious of the divine, are mystics. ….and Swami Prabuddhananda defined mysticism as ‘the realization of relationship between the individual soul and the infinite reality‘” P423

Hick, John, (1981) Mystical Experience as Cognition in Understanding Mysticism, ed. Richard Woods, London: The Athlone Press

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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’

afghan-woman.jpgBe 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

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

 

Free Schools India – work worthy of your support?

You might feel that this work is worthy of some support, we do;

Free Schools India is a small organisation made up of people dedicated to sustainable development, and to the ideal that all children should receive a free, quality, education. We are a collection of people from several fields who have come together to start a school for the children of the rural poor in several villages. From this idea our vision for this project has grown into something bigger, and we have already moved into the provision of health care also. Our plans do not stop here though. We would one day like to be able to provide full medical insurance for the families of our children and the wider community, and maybe one day start some micro industry.

The Inspiration

While working for an anti-child labour non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Delhi , Joanna Härmä and Gaurav Siddhu had the opportunity to speak with children in the city and in villages about their experiences with school. They found in one village that several girls could have attended school, if only it had been completely free of cost. Their families were not at all reliant on the income these children received from stitching footballs all day, but the costs associated with schooling were prohibitive for them, and yet they amounted to only US$15 per annum.

Go HERE to read more about Free Schools India

Go HERE to read BBC report on Free Schools India

free-schools-india.jpg

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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’.

Starting your own school

Today someone wrote me from Mexico and asked about starting a holistic school or centre. Below is what I wrote back but I will add more as I think of it;

If I were much younger and was able to start a school, my hard-won general principles would include;

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1 Find the finance to buy a school that is already successful. Develop its potential further – including the summer period. Don’t change anything until you understand everything and fully have the trust of the parents staff and children. Alternatively if all you can do is teach 3 children under the village tree then do that. Or support others in home-schooling.

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2 Develop an MA course and get it accredited by an internationally acceptable university.

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3 Draw your MA students from around the world and pair them with classroom teachers for at least half of each day. The teachers with their MA student assistants would consequently be involved in on-going research that was classroom-inspired – what is the best way to teach Maths?, how can the spiritual dimension of all subjects be developed?, what is the optimum amount of physical expression e.g. drama, dance etc.

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4 Make sure that you eventually institutionalize the holistic procedures – one school I about to be holistic when the core charismatic teachers left.

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5 Live what you teach.

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6 Be democratic – use PFC Philosophy for Children but realize that your responsibilities as an adult mean that it is you that will be held to account! Make clear contracts between all stakeholders including children, teachers, parents, community members etc. Authority must be given to the Head – revising policy by others should be restricted to just a few meetings per year.

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7 If the children can help build and care for the school, along with community members, it would be very useful!

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Of course there are a whole bunch of more general principles that you can assemble – have sufficient finance to last if your development stages take 2 or 3 times as long as you expect. etc.

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One UK source of relevant advice is the Human-scale Education movement

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

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

well-of-life.jpgSculpture 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

40 Meditation Practices – the Chris Corrigan collection

buddha.jpgSource 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

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

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

island.jpg

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

The Golden Rule as one aspect of the world-view shared by most holistic educators

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The Golden Rule

Two aspects of the world-view shared by most holistic educators are Perennial Philosophy (see separate post) and the Golden Rule.

 

 

One measure of the challenge facing us is in the following. In looking for short definitions that might be useful I was struck by the fact that several (many?) Western encyclopedias actually refer to the Golden Rule as a Christian doctrine! Ethnocentricity rules! The point is also well pinned down in an interesting article from Arab News by Iman Kurdi

Below are some of the most interesting sites that present and explore the Golden Rule along with some suggestions for lessons and all ages.

 

http://www.jcu.edu/philosophy/gensler/goldrule.htm

http://www.goldenruleradical.org/

Home

 

SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR LESSONS/Discussion

1 In what sense is the Golden Rule the same as or different to acting justly?

2 Collect some examples, via interviews, of where the Golden Rule was applied with good effect?

3 Choose several of the problems that exist in the world and see how far you can a) analyze the problem and b) obtain inspiration for steps toward a solution.

poster.gifSource – for your poster Golden Rule info and much more

 

A TOUCH OF IRONY: The Wiki entry on the Golden Rule currently shows the price of democracy in that it is hung up in disputes! Re-named as the Ethic of Reciprocity – has it been hijacked or up-lifted by philosophers! I’m sure it will settle eventually – in the mean time there is a lot of good stuff alread on the site – including additional sources.

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

Summaries are HERE