The BIG Picture

I've been doing what I LOVE to do----spending hours Googling in a knowledge tree, one author/topic peaking my curiosity, sending me deeper down the rabbit holl, deeper and deeper until I come right back where I started, but now I see the trees shimmer, they are vigorous systems of coursing cellular juices, sturdy yet tendril-thin roots pushing down into the earth, nuzzling the nutrients like a puppy with his snout in the foodbowl......

I have spoken to several people who have given me excellent ideas on how best to write this book, with exercises, curricula, for me to create an entire system of Integral education.  But I don't need to be exhaustive in my coverage, which reduces my tension around the project.

I often buy WIE, but at times I've found the articles off of the topics I find compelling, except for his exchanges with Ken.  But this issue resounded with relevant articles, I bought 3 books as a result of the articles, and I am off and running with encouragement.

"Professors Without Answers" is the perfect complement to my Kosmos Journal article!  This brought me back to HERI, and I really need to get in touch with the Astins; they are doing precisely what I need to use for substantiation of my work. 

Ken's and Andrew's conversation was just wonderful, lifting me into a shimmering state of consciousness. 

"KW: What do you think are the precursors of the authentic self, the little nibblets of it showing up in childhood and getting bigger in adolescence and then flowering at second tier?......The soul is nascent in its early stages during childhood and starts to blossom later on......One thing that's obviously important is not just that cognitive component but the real capacity for integrity......So if you havem in the self's development, going back to childhood, those conditions that  help the self become integral at those earlier stages, then by the time it hits second tier, it's going to be more likely to be able to awaken as the authentic self....The point is that we can help people at earlier stages be prepared for this by helping those precursors to be in place---....I think it's great to think about these precursors, because it does allow us to think about education----an education for the authentic self."

This has been my life for the past 15 years, as each year I began to experiment with Ken's theory and gently push along the lines of incorporating Integral education into my sociology, history,  and law classes, ninja-like, while keeping the harmonics enjoyable and non-confrontational for those who are not at that stage to truly register what I am saying.

Next article, by Robert Godwin, "The Only Journey There Is", serves as background that helps us surround and highlight  the laser-like precision of Ken's words into a softer, chalky smudge that can fill in the frame of the Bigger Picture.  He uses the metaphors of the horizontal versus the vertical elements of evolution.  The horizontal is what my school considers to be education, the piling on of more and more facts, and to call that an educated person.  But the depth is rarely hit upon, and the students notice this!  They are frustrated but used to the lack of attention to the vertical depth and height of the very material that they are trying to get the kids to appreciate.  My students tell me that a work of Shakespeare might be taught by memorizing who said what lines, and only rarely is the existential import, depth and heights, of the work even touched on---gotta move that curriculum!!
(I'm tired, more tomorrow on WIE and the great articles.  I'm subscribing again!)

(back the next morning.  I have free time from about 10pm to about 10:45 when I poop out, and am no longer focusing.)

Evolution is what he refers to as the vertical shift forward, which is a really easy way of explaining Ken's more accurate typology of LR causing shifts in the LL and then reverberations all over the matrix.  He states the exact words that I just used in class last week---attachment theory, round 3!  How we are hard-wired during the 1st 2 years of life, the pre-verbal time, hard to unearth those existential dilemmas, as I call them when I teach Erikson.

Now here's a book to throw in Mel Gibson's ugly anti-semitic face (ooops, can't forget compassion/forgiveness) when he made Apocalypto.  his thesis is that those ugly barbarians were rescued by the arrival of God-fearing Spaniards who would teach them Almighty Love.  Well, Mel, read Lloyd deMause.  I've read about this but have now purchased his book on the history of child-rearing.  IT WAS HORRIBLE IN SPAIN, IN FRANCE, IN ENGLAND.  It has only been the LR techno-economic base that made child labor no longer a necessity, the change in understanding of the body's pain responses, Freud, Marx, Erikson and so on, who changed the way we look at children, and thus how Western culture treats children.  The Enlightenment plus the 20th century has made it impossible for us to empathize with or understand strapping bombs onto our young men and women and then celebrating their explosion into shards of flesh and bone.

And Godwin thrills me when he writes that our brains are, indeed, evolving:  "The more humane your child rearing and the better your nutrition, the more opportunities you have to actualize your potential".  So what is the next stage of maslow for us to offer in high school, in my hgih-functioning, excellent public scfhool?  Just the very program of Integral that I can filter into it.