Contact: Facebook. |
Planetary Metaphysics and EducationPresented to: The American Humanistic Education Conference, Pheonix, Arizona, April 22, 1983 IntroductionThe title of this paper has a rather foreboding sound. Because of this, I shall begin by very briefly defining my terms before stating the purpose of this paper. What exactly is a planetary metaphysics? We must acknowledge at the outset that the discipline of philosophy has spent a long and distinguished career polishing the subject of metaphysics. However, the sense in which I use the word is closer to a popular meaning. When I use the word “metaphysics,” I am speaking of a large body of beliefs encompassing a whole range of subjects: astral travel, telepathy, faith healing, fire walking, clairvoyance, dowsing, fortune telling, near-death experience of the infinite, and the like. Many people on the street would understand me if I used the word in this way. In fact, metaphysics in this sense has been mapping terrain which until recently has been denigrated by both scientists and philosophers. Rozak speaks of this uncharted territory as “the Aquarian Frontier” in his book The Unfinished Animal.1 Metaphysics in this sense very nearly defies definition. However, I shall make a stab at it here. Metaphysics is the science of the spiritual dimension of human experience. Notice the interesting combination of science and spiritual. These two were thought to be mutually exclusive by the dominant mode of Western thinking in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Now we are beginning to understand and explore the spiritual contours and regularities of our experience. There are two important associations to be brought out concerning the word “planetary.” The image of our planet serves two functions. On the one hand, it serves to emphasize the connectedness of things here on the earth. In this connection, the words “global,” “international,” and “ecological” come to mind. We think about our earth in terms of its balance or lack of balance: peace or war, conservation or waste, cooperation or destruction. On the other hand, our planet is but a speck in the vast infinite universe. We think here of the possibility of other forms of life, of divine intelligence, of new frontiers to be explored. And so a planetary metaphysics would be a science of the spiritual connectedness of things here on earth to each other and to the past reaches of the universe. We can imagine developing knowledge and technology of peace, of conservation, of exploration. We can also foresee knowledge of our inner frontiers, since spirit connects with spirit in as yet barely understood ways. Perhaps soon there will be degrees in planetology or spiritology. That would allow us to get rid of that nasty word, “metaphysics.” Let me then turn to stating the purpose of this paper. There are three sections. First, I will state four principles which I believe characterize the new discipline of planetary metaphysics. Each principle will be shown to embody a new metaphor for conceptualizing the human condition. Second, I will show how contemporary science has tended to move its data collecting and theorizing in a direction consistent with these four principles. And finally, I will discuss how each of these principles might affect education on our planet. Metaphysical principlesIn this section I begin to systematize planetary metaphysics, or planetology.2 I do this by identifying and stating four metaphysical principles (that is, scientific principles about planet spirit) which, it seems to me, characterize New Age thinking. As each principle is stated, I shall attempt to show how it substitutes one metaphor for reality for another one. The first principle could be called the principle of the interconnectedness of physical objects. ALL PHYSICAL OBJECTS ARE EXTENDED THROUGHOUT SPACE AND TIME, AND SINCE THEY INTERPENETRATE ONE ANOTHER, CAN INFLUENCE ONE ANOTHER AT ANY TIME AND PLACE. This principle states the polar opposite of a dominant Western belief about the interaction of physical objects during the last 350 years. Some people call this aspect of the dominant model the Newtonian model; I call it the billiard ball model. In this picture of physical reality, each object is always exactly somewhere at some time and weighs just so much. Objects the size of a baseball can only affect each other by touching. Gravitational and nuclear forces exist, but they don't affect human scale object interactions. The spider web provides a New Age reinterpretation of reality. Objects are more like points on a invisible cosmic spider web than balls on an intergalactic pool table. When anything moves on a spider web, the whole web responds. Every metaphor has its points of dissimilarity. The cosmic spider web is not only extended in space, but also in time. In other words, if we jiggle a point in the future, that instantaneously readjusts the past to some extent. Incidentally, the spider web provides a good reinterpretation of human influence. Our consciousness can be focused along a web of psychic connections. The primacy of consciousness is a good label for our second principle, which has been a standard idealist thesis for centuries. CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE PRIMARY EXISTENT, AND PHYSICAL OBJECTS ARE AT BASE CONSCIOUS SUBSTANCE AND DERIVE THEIR BEING FROM THIS BASE. The dominant Western model sees physical objects as existing in the field of space and time independently of any human or cosmic awareness. This model can be traced directly through Descartes. We still learn about Cartesian coordinates in high school algebra classes. Every object has its coordinates, regardless of whether we know it or not. A planetary model for our second aspect of reality is the movie projector. The objects we see are really just projections of the conscious mind. Until now, we have been so engrossed in the movie, that we have neglected to examine the projectionist. And what a movie it has been, these last 330 years, filled with all the sex and violence one could imagine. Now the human mind has been to reflect the projections of Christ and Ghandi to a greater degree. Unlike the spider web, this metaphor has already developed an extra dimensional expression in our practical reality—all those horrible 3-D movies. Our third principle does not replace, but rather complements a dominant Western reality metaphor. I call it the principle of the formal effectiveness of consciousness. CONSCIOUSNESS CAN ALTER PHYSICAL OBJECTS, NOT ONLY THROUGH ACTION, BUT ALSO THROUGH THE MERE ACT OF RECONCEPTUALIZATION. We inherited from the Romans the idea of realizing our dreams by doing and building. And we have built a great technological society on this idea. We have utilized the “laws”of the physical world to create our dreams. But these “laws” were based on the two metaphors previously mentioned: the world as billiard table and as independent reality.3 In a phrase, we believed that consciousness could only alter our physical environment through physical action. Along with our tendency to make and do, we inherited a set of beliefs from Locke concerning how we acquire knowledge. Locke's view of the matter was that our mind was a blank tablet and that knowledge is built up out of sense impressions. This model of mind as a tabula rasa received much reinforcement in the Twentieth Century by behavioristic theories such as those of Skinner, which perceived the “knowing” organism as reactor to external stimuli. Such a model has prevented us until recently from developing the principle of the formal effectiveness of consciousness. The planetary model of knowing posits that the mind is much more like an easily modified plastic mold. Like those rubber molds of the Disney characters that so many of us played with in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the mind takes the plaster dust of our experience and casts it into familiar forms. Unlike the Disney model set, however, creative kids (which are all of us) can modify our molds to suit our purposes. More recently we have created Purposeful Porpoise, Walter and Wendy Wisewolf, Liberated Woman, and New Age Man. These creatures communicate much better than Minnie and Mickey or Tom and Jerry. 0ur fourth and final principle I call the unity of planet awareness. THE PLANET EARTH IS ITSELF A LIVING ORGANISM COMPOSED OF ALL ITS PARTS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS TO ONE ANOTHER, AND ESPECIALLY, THERE IS A SINGLE, LOVING, CONSCIOUS ENTITY WHICH IS AN ORGANIZATION OF ALL THE CONSCIOUSNESSES OF EARTH. Now when you and I went to school, we learned that if there was a basket of fruit with a banana, an orange, an apple, and a pear, there was no way that you and I were going to get that same pear! We might split it, or agree to take different pieces of fruit, that was all. We can't both own Boardwalk. And we can't both have the same pie. We have to cut it in two. It was thought that somehow, this was a self-evident truth, called the identity principle in logic. Enter the hologram. For those of you who haven't yet seen one of these fascinating creatures, it is a three-dimensional image produced by interfering light patterns on a photographic plate. If you break this photographic plate in two, you do not get two halves of an image. Instead, you get two whole images, but reduced in detail. In other words, if the plate has recorded a picture of a basket of four pieces of fruit, and you break it into fourths, you get not a picture of an apple, a pear, a banana, and an orange, you get four slightly fuzzy images of a basket of four pieces of fruit. In concluding this section we might well summarize by contrasting the old metaphors with the new ones . Traditional Western thinking saw physical objects as balls on a billiard table, independent of any knower. Knowledge came from our forming sense impressions of these balls on the blank tablet of our mind. And if we decided to go out for dessert after our pool game, there was no way that you and I could eat the same piece of pie. New Age thinking sees physical objects as points on a four-dimensional cosmic spider web. What is more, consciousness projects these objects on a screen, even molds them from the clay of experience and the plastic forms of the mind. If we change the forms, then we can actually change reality. And finally, each person's knowledge of reality is a piece of the universal pie, and we can all have as much as we can absorb. TABLE 1: Metaphysical Replacement Metaphors
Science Goes MetaphysicalThe traditional Western approach to knowledge is provincial in at least two ways. On the one hand, it has excluded as mere opinion all those claims to knowledge, such as philosophy and literature, which cannot be verified by repeatable sense observation. On the other hand, it has excluded the proven methods of Eastern thought, which do not aim at describing an objective order, but rather at changing the very being of the disciple. These exclusions have had their benefits. Early in this century argument raged between the behaviorists and the introspectionists in psychology. Data obtained from introspection was to be forbidden, or at the most, explained on the basis of theories built only on the data of shared perception. Supposedly, introspective data was subjective and not to be trusted. The exclusion of such data did tend to standardize the Western psychologist’s approach, and this, in turn, yielded a body of knowledge. The exclusion of Eastern methods of thinking is partly due to cultural chauvinism, but there is another reason. Eastern thought was seen as primarily religious belief, with only rudimentary embedded science. Western science had fought a hard-won battle with Western clerics to determine the status of beliefs based only on authority. Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin, all these had their battle with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. We owe our current freedom from religious dogmatism to the dogged determination of the very science which I now criticize. Unfortunately, we have exchanged the black-robed priest for the white-smocked scientist as the symbol of unquestionable authority. The concern that several babies were thrown out with the behaviorist, anti-religious bath water is becoming overwhelming. In the last ten to fifteen years, a large body of scientific research has been devoted to phenomena heretofore thought by most respectable academics to be the subject of careless metaphysical thinking.6 To mention only a few areas, psychokinesis, remote viewing (clairvoyance), dowsing, psychic interaction of plants and animals, mental control of bodily functions, and out-of-body experiences have been studied carefully. The result has been respectable data which outstrips the area of reorganized verified theory.7 At the same time, physics has been undergoing a radical conceptual revision which is documented in several books.8 In this section of the paper, I will discuss some of the accumulating scientific evidence which tends to support each of the four metaphysical principles discussed in the first section. There is a final consideration before I can begin examining scientific contributions to planetary metaphysics. Nontraditional philosophical thinking and political and cultural developments have been as much responsible for the revolution in our thinking as have scientific developments. Indeed, they have generated much scientific retrenchment. In the course of this section, I shall have occasion to mention these forces too. Let us begin with the interrelatedness of physical objects. The several excellent books cited in footnote 8 have documented the way theoretical physics has come to this conclusion. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity led physicists to the realization that velocity was not a property of an object, but rather a relationship between an object and a system of reference. Peg one against Newton and Descartes. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle implied that subatomic particles were more like probability waves. Peg one against Einstein, who denied that God can play dice with the universe. Particles traveling faster than the speed of light exist. Peg two against Einstein, who thought that the speed of light was an upper limit. So Bell's theorem set the stage for our three dimensional spider web metaphor for physical reality. If we recall one additional fact, that model can be extended to incorporate the time dimension also. Over fifty years ago Einstein developed the concept of a light cone, which implies that from some perspectives, future events can cause past ones. The transformation from the billiard table to the spider web is not only possible, it is plausible, based on modern physics. In their book, Mind Reach, Targ and Puthoff report carefully constructed experiments of what they call remote viewing, the scientific term used for the transference of information about the perceptual images of one person to another under conditions where “normal” perceptual and wave channels are ruled out.10 Groups of “blind” subjects judged whether pictures of objects drawn by other subjects in Faraday cages matched pictures of objects viewed and transmitted by a third group of subjects. Results were highly significant. In his fascinating book on dowsing, or the location of substances, people, and objects by extra-sensory perception, Francis Hitching also describes a voluminous amount of such events.11 Water and metal dowsing is common and successful, as are finding criminals and kidnapped individuals. Police in some cities regularly consult “psychic” individuals in the solution of crimes. The principle of the primacy of consciousness (physical objects are projections of consciousness) has been made plausible by intense scientific investigation of the "mind-over-matter" phenomena. We have all heard and read of biofeedback.12 We are finding that much of the body's function can be controlled consciously. Initially, it was found that we could induce relaxation states of mind. Beyond that, migraine headaches, ulcers, heart attacks, could all be controlled if not eliminated with biofeedback training. Now, with the use of guided imagery and suggestion therapy such allegedly physical conditions as cancer are being cured. Western science has finally begun to catch up with Chinese and Indian philosophy, which has long operated on the assumption of extensive mind-body linkage. Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama, for example, documents with experiment the existence of systems unknown to Western medicine, but corresponding to the acupuncture meridians of Chinese and the chakra system of Hindu belief.13 Fakirs have been studied in college laboratories and found to survive hours, even days, with no detectable heart beat or breathing. Coming from the New Age side of this revolution, the entire wholistic health movement can be seen as a manifestation of the principle of the primacy of consciousness. It grows out of a recognition that, when it comes to awareness of the primacy of consciousness, Western medicine has been far more provincial than the so-called “primitive” healing systems of other cultures. Richard Grossinger 's excellent book, Planet Medicine, makes this point:
It should be noted in passing that contemporary science is only reflecting general cultural changes. Far from being in the forefront of knowledge, most scientists are only recently responding to inquiry initiated with the now well-documented counter-cultural movement. Our experimenting with altered states of consciousness, with Eastern mystical traditions, and with alternative life-styles were the first waves of the Aquarian Revolution to lap on the shores of the general awareness. Behaviorism and logical empiricism had cut down the lotus of spiritual science, but its roots were too deep to remove. Trimmed back in the '70s by a business-minded public, these virile tendrils are forming large buds in the '80s.15 Holistic models of intelligence gave impetus to our third conceptual revision—the formal effectiveness of consciousness. Gestaltists, such as Fritz Perls and Snygg and Combs16 have long been aware that behavior is a function of the perceptual field of the human being, which is organized along holistic principles. Piaget, a developmental psychologist, defined the concepts of accommodation and assimilation, which suggests a comparison of the developing knower to an amoeba-like entity which both changes and is changed by its conceptual food.
He cites evidence of fire-walking and other spiritual practices of other cultures, as well as personal miraculous healing experiences as evidence of the phenomenon under discussion. It is into Pearce's crack in the cosmic egg that many unexplained phenomena fall which support the formal effectiveness of consciousness. Until recently, belief in these events were considered so bizarre as to indicate serious mental imbalance. Occult literature is full of references to events which defy conventional explanation, events such as levitation, visitation of spirits, poltergeists, and the like.18 Some shrines, such as Lourdes, keep careful records of “miraculous”cures. I have had my own personal experiences with instantaneous healings. Conventional Western thinking merely shrugs at these events. However, the point here is that, under the right circumstances, the visualization and intention of an event may be sufficient to bring about its occurrence. What more and more Westerners are beginning to grasp is that one cannot remain within the limiting confines of behavioristic science and experience these regularities. One must be inducted into different disciplines; disciplines which train the will, the imagination, and the extended body so that new manipulations of reality are possible. And as this new sense of discipline merges with traditional Western science, a new sense of what knowledge is, and a new sense of what it is to be scientific is emerging. We come finally to the scientific basis for our fourth principle, unity of planetary awareness. The hologram is a reality. A beam of coherent light—that is, light which represents a single burst of monochromatic energy—is divided into two parts. One part is directly to a photographic plate, the other bounces off the photographic subject before reaching the plate. As a result, an interference pattern is produced on the plate itself which “looks” nothing like what is being photographed. However, when coherent light is now shone through the developed plate, a three-dimensional image is produced. We have already discussed the amazing properties of the hologram in the last section. Paul Pietsch, author of Shufflebrain, originally set out to disprove the newly advanced “holographic” theory of brain function, according to Brain/Mind Bulletin.19 He shuffled the brains of numerous salamanders, but they always began feeding the moment they regained consciousness. However, when a tadpole's brain was joined to the salamander's medulla, the salamander quit feeding. “Further research verified that not only instinct, but learning exists in the whole brain.” Pietsch finally concluded that, similar to an optical hologram, “…the brain perceives and remembers by the decoding and storage of complex interference patterns of ‘wavy logic.’” Perhaps you can see where this is leading. What Pietsch showed is that brain cells can be shuffled around and not affect the perceptual image of a salamander. Just as we can break up a holographic plate and not loose the total image, so can we break up the brain and not loose the gestalt. Perhaps there is an analogy at the planetary level. In other words, perhaps knowledge is a planetary hologram generated by the vibrations of the individual consciousnesses of the planet. This knowledge continues to grow despite the births and deaths of new minds. And each “person-cell” does contain a dim view of the whole. It can't be said that this is yet a verified theory. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for strongly entertaining the holographic theory of planetary awareness. Benton, for example, has gone so far as to conceptualize physical reality as a hologram created as a series of standing waves caused by interference in an originally undisturbed universal consciousness.20 The power of this model is in its ability to provide a conceptual scaffold for many of the extra-category events that conventional science is unable to explain. In turn, Bentov develops accounts of spirits, astral travel, spiritual advancement, remote viewing, and the beginning of the universe, all of these synthesized in light of new developments in physics. Let me express a final summary paragraph covering this section of the paper. The interconnectedness of physical objects, including human beings, since they have physical bodies, has been supported by advances in theoretical physics and careful research into remote viewing. The primacy of consciousness received initial impetus from biofeedback research, and can be seen reflected in the current holistic health movement. We owe increased awareness of the formal effectiveness of consciousness to extensions of Gestalt and developmental psychological thought. Systems such as those of Pearce and Castaneda account for the conceptual reshaping of reality. Finally, the unity of planetary awareness is an extension of the hologram, developed in physics and extended as a model to brain research and even to human knowledge itself. Educational ImplicationsIn this section I shall discuss the implications of planetary metaphysics for education. I must immediately say something about the scope of education, since I define it very broadly. A process of education is any intentional system of culture which leads people into purposeful ways of behaving. On this definition, families, peer-groups, circles of friends, business communities, communications systems such as the media and churches: all have their educational aspect. Some of these may even have more educational significance than the schools. Even the most seasoned educators struggle with the habit of equating education with schooling—but breaking this habit is part of planetary awareness. As Marilyn Ferguson points out in The Aquarian Conspiracy, New Age people do not equate education with schooling for a very good reason:
I also agree with her contention that the schools may be years or even decades behind the frontiers of knowledge in some cases. Her chapter on new ways of learning is an important and productive critique of U. S. education from the planetary perspective. However, I shall, as much as possible, avoid statements about the present quality of our schools. As a professional educator, I can testify that educational professionals do not like to be told that they are doing a poor job, especially by university professors, who have their own problems with maintaining quality education. And why should they like it, if they, like the rest of us, are beginning to realize that the major educational changes have to take place at a cultural and institutional level before schooling once again can proceed effectively? And so, I now take each of the four principles which I have discussed and supported in the first part of this paper and discuss ways in which we need to educate people to these perspectives. On my definition, that means discussing how we can lead people to be more purposeful in achieving transpersonal development. Let me reintroduce the idea of the interrelatedness of objects with a quote from Capra's Turning Point. “In modern physics, the image of the universe as a machine has been transcended by a view of it as one indivisible, dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and can be understood only as patterns in a cosmic process.”22 Physics (and now, psychology) is such a foundational discipline for the natural sciences, that it seems obvious that the schools must begin to incorporate much of this radical perspectival change. Educators need to communicate the exciting intellectual ferment which now pervades the natural sciences. It would be easy to project a "New Age" science curriculum based on the previously discussed paradigm shift. And yet, we must not repeat the mistakes of the past. Most educators have somewhat bitter memories of the new curricular packages of the '60s. When we look at those failures, we can learn a lot for contemporary revision of science curricula. I see two mistakes which must not be repeated. First, we must not force unwilling teachers into using materials in which they do not believe. And teachers will not believe in the new physics unless they can incorporate the New Age paradigm into their lifestyle. A teacher teaching holistic science with a fragmented life and social relationships will be ineffective. The other mistake of the old new curricula was entirely parallel to the first one. May I repeat verbatim. We must not force unwilling students into learning from materials in which they do not believe. How can a student incorporate into her life classroom facts about the interconnectedness of physical objects when she sees the social fragmentations of drug abuse, war weapons escalation, and media manipulation around her? The lesson is clear. The paradigm shift in physics to holistic perspective is but a part of the holistic transformation of the human race. Unless the schools begin to reflect this holism, a new, new physics curriculum will be as ineffective as was the old new physics curriculum. But do not think that I am suggesting there is a lower priority on transforming science education. As I have argued, traditional science has been a force against recognizing the psychic powers that humans possess. And as we have seen, the new physics paradigm, by emphasizing the interconnectedness of things, legitimizes investigation of such phenomena as remote viewing and dowsing. It would not be wise to have parapsychology courses in the schools which attempt to educate about psi phenomenon, while traditional general science courses promote the billiard ball conception of the universe. Let me turn to a second consequence of the interconnectedness of objects for education. We must agree that the media is a dominant educational medium in our century. Until very recently, media transmissions in TV, radio, and the movies, were hierarchically structured so that information passed only one way. This might have been partly due to technological limitations. However, with Satin, I believe that the media has simply reflected the overwhelming bureaucrats structure of our society.23 Networking provides a New Age corrective for this dangerous situation. Ivan Illich predicted this phenomenon in Deschooling Society.24 The idea is that people can form networks to inform each other, and that this can supersede the existing educational bureaucracy. Illich saw four kinds of networks giving access to educational objects, to experts, among peers, and as a barter system for exchanging services. I scoffed at this idea originally, yet now all of these networks exist and are expanding. And they clearly reflect the emerging planetary awareness that things and people can be interconnected, rather than organized from above. Networking is a powerful new mode of education, more powerful for planetary awareness, at present, than the schools. In St. Louis currently there is a delightful publication called Our Common Ground. This is a monthly calendar of New Age and related events. It is put together by volunteers once a month from submitted items. It includes activities as diversified as coven meetings, parents for gays meetings, Tai Chi lessons, dance-frees, past life readings, holistic health clinics, women’s poetry readings, transformational films, and concerts. It is distributed to likely contact establishments. Efforts like these are bound to spread the planetary spirit. I know I have profited from them. More insight into the problems of educating for planetary awareness can be gained in discussing implications of the second principle—the primacy of consciousness. Probably no transformational field relies more on networking than holistic health education. We are going to have to rely on networking for a long time to come for information on holistic health. Our culture is so thoroughly based on economic manipulation by business interests, that we are constantly bombarded with anti-health messages. Just yesterday I watched a McDonald ’s commercial for an allegedly complete meal—coke, french fries, Big Mac, and fruit pie. It 's a wonder we are still alive, eating all that refined sugar and flour, red meat, and fat. From a health food perspective, only the sesame seeds are an item. Television, movie theaters, and restaurants sell junk food, fast food, refined foods, coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes like they were going out of style. And, of course, they are going out of style, eventually. But people must believe that they project their own reality before they can avail themselves of the existing holistic health networks. I find it instructive to recount my own sinuous path to a smidgen of planetary awareness. I first began to be turned on to planetary metaphysics by a close friend who handed me books as they came out and ordered me to read them. As I developed a sense of the new revolution in human thought, I came to realize that university libraries and main line book stores were not very good places to find New Age consequences. Eventually, I came to rely on what I call book dowsing, that is, literally sensing my way to information which I perceived I needed. I shall never forget the time I intuitively found and entered a huge book store in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and walked straight to a book on Dowsing, having intended to do just that. How could I have done this, if I did not have the emerging viewpoint of reality as a projection of my consciousness? Under the heading of educational implications of the formal effectiveness of consciousness, I would like to discuss the question of how a person comes to have this power. How does a person learn to effect changes in his reality which would not occur based only on the consequences of physical action or the operation of the causal order? Two writers have much to say concerning this question—Joseph Chilton Pearce and Carlos Castaneda. In addition to his two books on metaphysics, Pearce has addressed the educational question in the fascinating bool, Magical Child. In this intricate book, he outlines a theory of the mind-brain as having three
Building on Piaget's developmental theory, he presents a theory of child development which posits five matrix shifts which the child must make: from the womb to mother, from the mother to earth at age seven, from the earth to being one’s own matrix at adolescence, and finally, a shift to mind processes not limited by the brain. In this last stage, however, the individual is still a part of the total earth hologram. In the final stage, mind has the power to do what are now considered to be miraculous things: heal, levitate bodies, and so forth. Pearce writes a scathing criticism of our contemporary birthing methods, which he claims do irreparable harm to the child. Then he offers a program for the parents of the “magical child” to follow. Birthing will be natural in the sense of returning to more “primitive” methods of child-mother bonding. The child spends much more time with the mother (and after age 2, with the father) until it is ready to explore the world at age seven. During this crucial period, all of the magical qualities of the child are encouraged by the parents, rather than repressed, e.g. labeled as psychoses or disabilities. Then, just as the Balinese child automatically becomes initiated into fire-walking, the magical child will be initiated into creative, reality-moulding modes of being. In fact, like Rousseau, Pearre thinks that formal schooling during the first decade of life, at least the lock-step, mass-production formal schooling most common, is destructive to new-age thinking. Pearce believes that once a child has passed the concrete operational stage in our “rational thought dominated” Western culture, there is little hope of transforming the mind so that it controls the reality function. Carlos Castaneda disagrees.26 Without entering into the controversy over the validity of Carlos Castaneda's writings, we can note here that his entire writings amount to a set of prescriptions for bringing the adult learner steeped in Western rational thinking to perceive a new reality, one in which a “warrior” can create extra-category (by Western standards) reality. The path is treacherous and involved, but it is passable by some. In "The Strategy of a Sorcerer" he reviews these methods.27 First, the sorcerer hooks his apprentice's will. Then he introduces the idea that the world we see is only a description of the world, through tasks which alter perception. Meaningless tasks also introduce the idea of acting without expecting an outcome. One must erase personal history through loosing self-importance, assuming responsibility, and using death as an advisor (as opposed to, e. g. , self-pity). Eventually, these and other procedures lead the apprentice to see, which is a function of will, not reason. Through this the apprentice gains access to the natural, or unknown, and gains control of “reality." Anyone familiar with the various forms of meditation will note the analogy between Castaneda's “way” and Eastern religious discipline. These are designed to reorient the disciple's perception so that one perceives the reality behind the illusion, so that one in samadhi is one with God. Whatever one may think about Balinese fire dancing, yaqui dons, and praniyama, these methods conjure up the most radical re-conception of education in general and formal education in particular. Furthermore, recalling Kandel 's dictum that society changes first, and schools follow, it is probable that if we are in a metaphysical revolution, the school will be the last to reflect this change. I cannot leave the question of the formal effectiveness of consciousness without mentioning its effects on gender education. If we have learned anything from the last ten years, it has been that there is no fixed model for masculinity or femininity in the nature of things. In the past, people have had rigid, patriarchal conceptual molds for the behavior of men and women, and they tended to cast these people in Disney-like roles, instead of relating to their real potential. As Satin has stated so well, ”in New Age society, our attitudes, values, and beliefs wouldn't be based on our sexual identities.” And again, “if we want to become whole, then we're going to have to get back in touch with that part of ourselves that has been lost to us through sex-role training and patriarchal attitudes.”28 The point to be made for education is that we may view the human rights movements of the '60s and '70s quite properly as educational movements. The flexible rubber molds for proper social behavior for men and women and for sexual and racial/ethnic minorities were changing. What appeared as confrontation of groups was actually necessary. Those militant blacks, women, and homosexuals were, after all, trying to raise our consciousness about a very important issue. The schools were hardly the proper or even the possible arena for these advances in human thought. And so I come finally to educational implications of the fourth principle: the unity of planetary awareness. There is so much that could be said here. However, I will restrict my comments to three areas: whole-brain learning, global education, and spiritual development. To begin with, the holographic image is turning out to be a major educational metaphor for our time. We have already seen that brain research has postulated that both human perception and memory are stored holographically. And education is seeing more emphasis on “whole-brain learning.” Recently the educational community has been excited by the prospect of a new kind of learning. In their book by that name, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder tell us about Superlearning.29 There are verified reports of students learning 1000 words a day and a whole language in a month. The idea is to take advantage of the fact that learning is best when the mind and body work in harmony. The system uses relaxed concentration, a rhythm of learning, different intonation by the teacher, breath control, and music-induced altered states of consciousness. Any physicist will tell you that it is very difficult to construct an effective holographic image. The same is true of superlearning. However, there are apparently conditions in which the mind can record information as efficiently as a photographic plate. Let me turn to global education. Even before we had a holographic concept of earth, we were coming to realize that our planet was very much a living organization, if not an organism. An organization literally at war with, poisoning, and devouring itself. We know what happens to human beings who are torn with conflict—hey die. Unfortunately, and at our own peril, we have fostered commercial and nationalistic perspectives in our schools, homes, and political meeting halls. Nationalism cuts the planetary hologram into fragments. We still see the whole picture, but from a dimmer perspective. I am not at all impressed with the people who so fear the Russians and the Chinese that they wish to take separatist, militaristic action. Global education must get beyond fear and hate to compassion and love. It must incorporate the non-violent techniques of Gahndi, of King, of Jesus. And so, the most important educational event for our leaders would be if we the people simply stopped going along with those who are still trapped at the level of power and started being planetary citizens. Thank the Planet, people are thinking and writing about these matters. The Fall, 1981 issue of Planet Earth is entirely devoted to “Education for Global Living,” This journal is an organ of the Planetary Initiative, planning a planetary congress in Summer, 1983, “where a new view of the world's future, with a powerful mandate of people throughout the world, will be developed.30 One author writes of the need for a new myth to “unfold the ways in which the human family transcended those crises and problems which have brought us to the brink of destruction.”31 This new myth will transcend the Western myth by integrating values from many human cultures around the central ideas of love, integrity and holism. Education must encourage such mindedness in children and adults. In the same issue we find Buckminster Fuller again speaking out for global education, while Robert Muller calls for education which can ”reassure the children and the people that governments are beginning to work together on an unprecedented scale to better know, monitor, protect, and manage our planetary home. He quotes Pope Paul II: “To reach peace, teach peace.”32 Finally, Chaudhuri provides a much needed set of guidelines for global education.33 Finally, I offer a few thoughts on spiritual development. As we near the 21st Century we are beginning to have a new appreciation of the connectedness of reality. We are beginning to see that events are connected synchronistically as well as causally.34 To put this in another way, it may be that changing the meaning of things changes their order in the space-time continuum. I think our feelings of awe, of reverence, and of devotion spring from an aspect of this connectedness of things. It will not be easy to educate for spiritual development. Yet the solution is so simple in concept. We must stop clutching in fear to the old metaphysics. It is the old Domino theory of the Vietnam War played over at last on a planetary scale. “But if we give in to reports of remote viewing, of astral travel, where will it end, What of the Satan Worshipers, the charlatan palm readers?” People are genuinely fearful of giving in and opening up to the Loving Spirit that rules this planet. They will tell you that they know they are not operating at the level of love, “because they 'd be eaten alive if they did.” And yet we must give comfort to these folks, even while we continue on our own spiritual paths. And there is much we can do. We can lead them from the billiard parlors and onto country paths when the morning dew is still fresh on the spider's web. We can write new scripts for the movie of life and project them on to the surfaces of social interaction. We can continue to explore flexible and open and magical role-models as molds for our children and for each other. Indeed, we can use our children as role-models! And we can share our beautiful, holographic, blue-green ball with all the colors of the racial rainbow. Should we choose this path, the Force will be with us. Footnotes1. Theodore Roszak, The Unfinished Animal, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975. ^ 2. A few people who have been kind enough to read and respond to my writing have commented that they found my use of “I” irritating or egotistical. My response is that such subjectivity is the hallmark of the emerging paradigm for human thinking. The ego that wrote this paper recognizes that it owes its entire existence and accomplishments to the Spirit of the Planet. It takes no credit for these thoughts. It does, however, recognize, through the use of “I”, that its views are only a fragment of the hologram. 3. In fact, Rupert Sheldrake has proposed the hypothesis of formative causation which states that “the universe functions not so much by immutable laws as by ‘habits’—patterns created by the repetition of events over time,” according to the August 3, 1981 issue of Brain/Mind Bulletin. 4. Itzhak Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum: on the Mechanics of Consciousness, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977, p. 120. 5. Joseph Chilton Pearce, Magical Child, New York: Bantam New Age Books, 1977, p. 253. 6. One book to document the scope of this material is Future Science, ed. by John White and Stanley Krippner, New York: Anchor Books 1977. 7. The following are selected references along this line. Roszak, Unfinished Animal, op. cit. ; Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability, New York: Dell, 1977; Francis Hitching, Dowsing, New York: Anchor Books, 1977; Hiroshi Motoyama with Rande Brown, Science and the Evolution of Consciousness, Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1978; and Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, Handbook of PSI Discoveries, London: Abacus, 1977. 8. The following is a sampling of such references: Fritjof Capra's two books, The Tao of Physics, New York: Bantam, 1976, and Turning Point, New York: Simon & Schuster,1982; Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: an Overview of the New Physics, New York: Bantam, 1979; Amaury de Riencourt, The Eye of Shiva: Eastern Mysticism and Science, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1981, and Fred Alan Wolf, Taking the Quantum Leap, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981. 9. Zukav, op. cit., p. 306. 10. Targ and Puthoff, op. cit. 11. Hitching, op. cit. 12. See, for example, Barbara B. Brown, New Mind, New Body, New York: Bantam Books, 1974. 13. Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama with Rande Brown, Science and the Evolution of Consciousness: Chakras, Ki, and Psi, Brookline, Mass.: Autumn Press, 1978. 14. Richard Grossinger, Planet Medicine: from Stone Ape Shamanism to Post-Industrial Healing, Boulder: Shambala, 1982, p. 102. 15. Existentialist and phenomenological writers have kept this metaphor alive in the Western world. For example, in Being and Nothingness Sartre posits the existence of a transcendental self, and discusses the intentionality of consciousness. The objects that we see are merely the contents of consciousness. We can "see" neither the projector, being for itself, nor the material of the projection, being in itself. Philosophical reflection, not scientific observation will reveal these facts. Other phenomenologists developed the method of bracketing an object to observe its essence. 16. Snygg and Combs, Individual Behavior, Rev. Ed., New York: Harper & Row, 1959. 17. Joseph Chilton Pearce, Magical Child, New York: Bantam New 18. See, for example, Colin Wilson, The Occult, New York: 19. Brain/Mind Bulletin, Vol. 6, No. 6, March 9, 1981, p. 4. 20. Itzhak Benton, Stalking the Wild Pendulum: on the Mechanics of Consciousness, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977. 21. Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Boston: distributed by Hougton Mifflin Company, 1980, p. 280. 22. Capra, Turning Point, op. cit., pp. 91-92. 23. Mark Satin's excellent book New Age Politics, (New York: Delta Books, 1978) shows how we live in a bureaucratic six-sided prison and what can be and is being done to break out. This is essential reading for planetary people! 24. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, pp. 112-113. 25. Joseph Chilton Pearce, Magical Child, p. 141. 26. See, for example, Richard De Mille, Castaneda's Journey, Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1976. 27. Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power, New York: Pocket Books, 1976, pp. 229-260. 28. Satin, .op cit., p. 111. 29. Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, Superlearning, New York: Delacorte Press and The Confucian Press, 1979. 30. Quote is from "Planetary Initiative for the World We Choose," Iniator, p. 8. 31. Betty Reardon, "The New Myth: Educating for Global Transformation," Planet Earth, pp. 3-6. 32. Robert Muller, "To Reach Peace, Teach Peace," Planet Earth, pp. 14-20. 33. Haridas Chaudhuri, The Evolution of Integral Consciousness, Wheaton, Il.: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1977, p. 84. 34. Jean Bolen, The Tao of Psychology, San Francisco: Harper & |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||