Tag Archives: education

Discovering the Missing Link

This afternoon, as an after-thought, my author-journalist LinkedIn connection emailed me, “On another note, your years living in Europe and your other international travel sound interesting. Must be a good story there. Would love to hear more when time permits.”

As a matter of fact, a section in Rethinking Survival describes the highlights of living in Europe. So I’ll share some of them here.

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EUROPE: Discovering the Missing Link

“If you love your children, tell them how the world works.” — Dr. Phil

According to the people who raised me, the way the world worked was this. If you “pleased” them, then they would take care of you: feed you, house you, pay the bills for your clothes . . . let you live. If you didn’t, they’d disown you, cut you off, write you out of their will. The end. Survival depended exclusively on being very good at pleasing those who controlled the money and the material resources which come from it.

In my case, this was a problem. What pleased one adult didn’t please the next. And what pleased me didn’t necessarily please any of them. It was, at best, a con. Bottom line: I had no idea of how the world really works, only that mine at the time didn’t work for me. When conflicting survival demands came to a head, I had to split. “Get out of town, Tonto. Pronto.”

The year Nixon was elected president, a poster hanging in my dorm hallway said it all. It showed him wearing Uncle Sam’s pin-stripe suit and top hat, finger pointing to recruit. The question posed:  “Would you buy a used car from this man?” My answer was, “No way!” I wasn’t in a position to change the country, so I changed my location. At the invitation to join up with a touring Brazilian chamber orchestra, I left for foreign lands.

Living abroad began the process of divesting the cultural conditioning I’d taken for granted. Being the only English speaker in the group made me rethink communication, getting down to the basics. When it took an effort to find the words, it was amazing how little really needed to be said. Accompanied with suggestive body language and facial expressions. a few words went a long way.

However, I found that change of scene, of language and cultural settings, changed nothing of substance. “Wherever you go, there you are.” In Sandor Vegh’s violin master class, students from around the world agonized over the same dilemmas I thought I’d left behind. They too thought they could escape problems just by walking away – but nothing is so easy.

Nao, a darkly mournful Japanese violist, described the shock of discovering her older brother’s dead body hanging limp in his clothes closet. Chiao, a bright shining extrovert, grieved over love lost. When she beat him to take first place in a violin competition, Alberto chose a less threatening lover as his companion.

My German hosts, who’d survived WWII, however, had much to teach. They didn’t take survival, as I had up to that point, for granted. A cellist friend with whom I stayed in St. Georgen, located in the Black Forest of South Germany, told me her mother’s story. To save her starving children’s lives during the Russian occupation of Berlin after the war, Frau Hass changed from oppressed housewife to heroic protector. In contrast, Herr Petersen, a 75-year-old portrait painter – my Düsseldorf landlord – recalled war time as “the best years.” It was only then– albeit of extreme necessity– that formal, inhibited Germans came out of their shells and actually talked with one another.

For me, the highlight of studies at the Robert Schumann Konservatorium wasn’t the music teachers, but a modest, insightful kinesiology instructor. Frau Lehru wasn’t a musician herself. But vocal and instrumental teachers alike sent students beyond their help to her.

The pianist whose lessons were scheduled the hour before mine told me her story. Herr Dreschel had given up on her as either lazy or untalented. But Frau Lehru diagnosed the real problem — pinched spinal nerves. Recommended visits to a chiropractor worked “miracles.” Elated, she was a “new person.”

I went to her studio and asked Frau Lehru to coach me. Her lessons were wonderful. She saw timidity in my posture and tension in the way I held my violin. She gave me exercises to correct not only my posture, but the underlying attitudes which bent me out of shape.

“Platz machen,” she encouraged me. “Make room! Don’t crowd me!” And, “Auf wiederstand waschen.” Figuratively, Grow upwards. Stand tall under the pressure of resistance and adversity.

In retrospect, it was if she’d reinvented the yogic disciplines which sitar and tabla students are taught in India, where music technique is balanced with breathing and physical exercises. Her gift inspired a change in my career goals. Rather than teach technique, I could help many more musicians by becoming an exercise-and-therapy coach in one, like her. She was much too busy to consider writing about her methods and results. I would do this for her with a book called The Body as Instrument: How to Tune It. (Still later, ratcheting up another notch, I aspired to build schools to facilitate a whole generation of coaches like Frau Lehru.)

Even more influential than people, however, were two books I discovered in Düsseldorf’s International Book Market on Königs Allee. In combination, they substantially broadened my life’s horizons. One was the Wilhelm/Baynes English translation of the Chinese I Ching, the Book of Change. The other was Carl Jung’s autobiography, Memories Dreams and Reflections. This Swiss analyst also wrote the introduction to the Wilhelm/Baynes translation.

I’m now aware of much that’s been written about Jung’s darker side. But in 1970, I resonated with his descriptions of self-discovery. In particular, I related to the story about his quickest cure. A young woman, the daughter of wealthy, stylishly atheistic parents was instantly healed of her neurosis upon learning of her heritage. Her grandfather had been a Talmudic scholar. Though an embarrassment to her parents, he was regarded by peers as a saint. This knowledge gave her permission to know what she “knew,” and released her psychological suffering instantly.

As it happened, I’d just been contacting my grandparents, asking them to write me about their history. I did so because Herr Oswald Peterson, my portrait painter landlord, insisted I was not American. “Who are you?” he wanted to know.

I’d already known that in her youth, my father’s mother, Grandma Ellie West, had a gorgeous soprano voice. What I learned from her letters was that she’d auditioned for John Philip Sousa’s world tour and was invited to join his band as a soloist. But she decided to stay home instead to marry my grandfather, Hub. She heartily approved of my European music jaunt. “Good for you!”

I was fascinated to learn from Grandpa Dave, my mother’s father, that his father came from Russia. He was a “very good” tailor by profession and a Talmudic scholar as well. A-ha. Who would have guessed? It opened a door of new possibilities in my mind.

Because Jung experienced dreams as the winged messengers of key insights, I began paying attention to mine. The dream I remember best was of climbing the third-story stairs of Herr Peterson’s building. He’d never repaired the roof after the WWII, so the top flight led to rubble and open air.

In my dream, however, I discovered a new floor that hadn’t been there before. It was dimly lit and full of draped furniture, covered with cobwebs. As I brushed away the dust, details of this new room began to emerge. It was as if I were entering into a new level of personal awareness.

As for the I Ching, I’d had a hunch about it for a very long time. Dr. Ellsworth Carlson, who lived in Shansi, China during WWII, was an Oberlin College classmate of my parents. When I was nursery school age, he’d bounced me on his knees at Harvard. As Freshman student, I took his course in Asian History at Oberlin. What stuck with me how vast an influence the I Ching had on Chinese thinking for 8,000 years and counting.

In fact, when I left for Europe, I carried only my violin and one small suitcase. Of that, half was filled with clothes and personal items. The other half contained sheet music and one small book: the Legge translation of the I Ching. It made no sense to me. I could barely get through a page or two before giving up. But I kept coming back to it. There was something important there that I had to know more about.

Finally, with the Wilhelm/Baynes edition, I had a version I could relate to. It literally became my teacher. It gave me a whole new concept of how the world really works. Not just this family or that institution or the other county. Not arbitrary and capricious, fluctuating fashions, but the constant anchor over time. From it, I could deduce the fundamental energy dynamics of action and reaction which drive relationships, internally at a psychological level, and externally in terms of practical, day-to-day events and their long-term consequences.

It was an extension of the logic my English teacher Miss Elson impressed on my high school brain. But more. It gave me a map of logical consequences, as inevitable as computer language. “If this, then that.”

For example, If you kick people, they kick back (if they can) or otherwise resist. If you are kind, you inspire love and trust in others. If you violate natural law, nature bites back (your mental health suffers; relationships deteriorate; your behavior becomes erratic and social/physical survival is imperiled). Asian cultures call this “the law of karma.” Its operation is also described in biblical terms: “As ye reap, so shall ye sow,” and “to everything there is a season.”

In sum, its 64 permutations map a progression of the AC-DC energy changes which constitute the natural law of repetitive, cyclical change. From my point of view, this ancient, timeless science fills a critical blind-spot in Western thinking, lacking which, all efforts are partial and incomplete. Put another way, the glaring absence of this information explains why so much goes so wrong, despite even the best of intentions on the part of politicians, priests, coaches and leaders of every ilk.

. . .  [an understanding of natural law], the practical, middle (energy) level of three-part experience, is essential to the whole. It’s a sorely missed link in our functional knowledge base. Without wisdom and skill at this middle level of experience, spiritual aspirations cannot be realized nor can political policies be effectively implemented. Ongoing sex scandals which plague high-level military leaders, politicians and Christian clergy give a hint of what’s missing from their training, causing them to fail miserably at great expense to those they should be serving.

I’m a Boundary Spanner. Are You?

Last Saturday, a LinkedIn connection traveling in the Middle East sent me a delightful email. It started, “Just read some of your essays in your new handbook and it left me wanting to read more. I like your holistic approach to problem solving and living life.”

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He followed with comments and questions you may have too. So I decided I’ll answer them here.

An author and journalist, he wrote, “Your background, with a Ph.D in Educational Admin, seems so ‘traditional’ that I was taken by surprise when I discovered that you’re an innovative thinker.”

This surprise is no surprise. Most who’ve survived the credentialing process have been flattened and homogenized beyond recognition. They’re rewarded for becoming “experts” inside a narrowly defined field and only on a specific subject within that limited area. Professional survival depends on pleasing gatekeepers who rigidly define what can be known and said.

In Rethinking Survival, I describe my personal experience of this process. Not pretty. My purpose was to build an accredited School Without Walls that would allow self-responsible students to create career-specific degree programs.

For example, a golfer whose dream was to build a world-class golf course could pick and choose the subjects essential to achieving his goal. Classes on how to run a small business could be combined with architectural courses to engineer golf greens, agricultural courses to maintain them, education classes to teach beginning golfers, and marketing classes to attract new customers.

Another aspect of the School Without Walls solved the dilemma of highly educated graduates entering the job market with zero job experience. A supervised internship program was intended to link students with mentors inside government institutions, non-profit agencies, corporations, hospitals or small businesses. Experienced insiders would be given the opportunity to share valuable experience in return for the assistance of a highly-motivated intern.

I’d come to the idea of building the School Without Walls from personal experience. As a musician, I wasn’t satisfied with training limited to violin technique. I wanted to know everything about everything that goes into music from every point of view.

I wanted to know about the physics of sound vibration and the science of violin making. I needed to know about the history behind composers’ biographies, the literature they read, about psychology and the religions that inspired their music. Eventually, my search included kinesiology and yoga, the fundamental disciplines of movement and breath awareness practiced by musicians in India.

Traditional schools didn’t help much in this quest. Even so-called interdisciplinary studies were timid in their scope. Not to be discouraged, I patched together what I could from every possible source, eventually studying in Europe and India to learn what wasn’t taught in American schools.

So by the time I entered graduate school at the UW-Madison, I’d already traveled far beyond traditional boundaries, both physically and philosophically. I returned fully motivated to earned the degree in Educational Administration which could be used to make the journey easier for others than it had been for me.

Therefore, my answer to his next question probably isn’t what he’d expect. He wrote, “I would think there is a niche for your writings in schools that teach Eastern philosophies and with educational institutions that are progressive thinkers and open to new ways of teaching.”

The main point of The Positive Paradigm Handbook is that the basics are universal. They’re shared in common by everyone, everywhere. They’re not the exclusive property of this or that culture or cult. In fact, the narrowing fragmentation of knowledge into increasingly smaller niches is a dangerous symptom of dark times. In the Handbook, I put it this way:

In a world seemingly intent on fracturing experience into smaller and smaller niches, the Positive Paradigm provides an urgently needed counter-balance, applying an opposite and equal weight in a unifying direction.

The change series answers Einstein’s call: “We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” Those who succeed in returning to the universal basics are most likely to survive whatever dangers are to come.

The Positive Paradigm of Change embodies the Unified Theory which Einstein already had (though didn’t know it). The Handbook’s presentation of the basics is new and appropriate to the times. However, the basics themselves aren’t new. Just neglected. It would be a contradiction in terms to relegate the Positive Paradigm of Change to a niche, nor is the concept “progressive.”

The timeless Unified Theory is universal. Like a laser beam, it illumines the field wherever it’s pointed. The difference today is that modern physics now confirms the same Unified Theory which ancient teachers called yoga (which means “union”).

From this standpoint, the necessary interconnectedness of every field of knowledge is apparent. Hence, in Rethinking Survival, a full chapter is devoted to boundary-spanners as leaders. There’s even a favorite riddle that makes the point. Question: “How does an elephant play bridge?” Answer: “It puts two feet on one side of the river, and two feet on the other.”

In the 1980’s, there was an encouraging trend towards reunifying fragmented bodies of knowledge. For example, a Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at the UW-Madison led by Reid Bryson coordinated the physical sciences related to climate change – geology, oceanography, meteorology, etc. What it didn’t include, however, was social, political, and ethical studies. The interdisciplinary department facilitated coordinated data collection. No thought was given to training decision-makers about making responsible, effective use of that information.

In addition, in Positive Paradigm context, there’s still more. We urgently need to restore leadership training that enables social and physical scientists to link the surface of their daily lives with the deeper levels of human experience. These include the middle level of the Wheel associated with emotional intelligence and functional ethics, the inner level associated with insight and intuition, and the eternal silent center called “conscience.”

In the never-ending School of Life, we are each self-responsible for acquiring this knowledge and putting it into practice as best we can. The Positive Paradigm sums up the basics of what Huxley called the perennial philosophy common to the world’s great religions. The Handbook not only pictures and explains the paradigm, but gives practical methods for implementing it.

Appropriately mainstreamed, it has the potential to tip the scales in favor of human survival. It’s that starkly simple.

I’m a boundary spanner. Are you? If not, let’s give new meaning to the famous warning of a beloved American president: “Take down those walls.”

Rethinking CRIME

Today, I’m fulfilling a promise made on a LinkedIn thread in answer to the question, “Crime, Is It Natural?” I responded to look here for my perspective on this very important question. After all, CRIME just happens the very first of the UPSG Essays.

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1. CRIME

 “Our time has committed a fatal error; we believe we can criticize the facts of religion intellectually . . . The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.” — C. G. Jung, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 13.

“Nature itself has a pulse, a rhythmic, wavelike movement between activity and rest . . . We are capable of overriding these natural cycles, but only by summoning the fight-or-flight response and flooding our bodies with stress hormones. We can only push so long without breaking down and burning out.” — Loehr & Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement

“Your life is created from the inside out, so you must get right with you on the inside — and that takes time and focus on you; not your social mask, but you. . . You are uniquely equipped for a mission in this world, and to fail to commit to finding that mission and then achieving it is to wither the mind, body and spirit.” — Phillip C. McGraw, Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out

THE FRONT

Linguistic roots of crime indicate a verdict, an object of reproach, or offense. According to Webster’s, crime is an act which the law prohibits. Conversely, it is failure to act as the law orders. Crimes are variously punishable by death, imprisonment, or the imposition of fines and restrictions.

A second kind of crime is an offense against morality, called sin. More loosely, this word is used to refer to something regrettable. “It’s a crime you didn’t finish school.”

What’s significantly missing from Webster’s definitions is reference to violations of Natural Law. Over millennia, Asian practitioners evolved sophisticated sciences which map the subtle laws of energy movement and study the effects of natural change on human physiology, behavior and institutions. For thousands of years, health sciences, social structures, business practices and the education of monastic, government and military leaders alike were based on this practical understanding of human dynamics.

Westerners, in contrast, have little functional understanding of Natural Law and violate it with impunity. We experience subtle energy shifts as emotional reactions or the erratic ups and downs of daily life. Because Western cultures are historically out-of-tune with energy dynamics at this level of law, it is often referred to as the unconscious. Crimes of passion and self-sabotage are proof of this bind spot.

The focus of Conscience: The Ultimate Personal Survival Guide is the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Change. It embodies a time-tested method for making the unconscious conscious. As the repository of Natural Law, it fills a gap in the way we’ve been taught to think about life.

Restoring its ancient wisdom to current awareness could correct mistakes in the ways we think and therefore act, revitalizing virtually every field of endeavor, from the healing and entertainment arts to the political and social sciences.

In I Ching context, the worst crimes are those we commit against ourselves when we accept and act on limiting suggestions. When we block out the lower octave of sub-rational intelligence (the middle, energy level of the Life Wheel) as if it didn’t exist, we fail to recognize and release the buried fears that sabotage our rational decisions.

When we disown the higher octave of our super-rational awareness, (the Center of the Wheel) we block out intuitive access to the Book of Life, written in our very DNA — the universal source of creative solutions, the means of healing every disease, and hope of ultimate survival.

Those who dismiss, demean or control children with fear condemn them to empty lives of masked conformity on the material surface of the Life Wheel. Instilling extreme ideas about death, as if it were either a reward or ultimate punishment, one’s only hope or worst enemy, results in living inappropriate to reality.

 The more moderate, I Ching view accepts mortality as a natural change. Sages use keen awareness that time on Earth is limited as motivation to live authentic to their true selves, making the best possible use of every precious moment here and now.

To keep people in ignorance, lulling them into inaction by minimizing future dangers or the opportunities inherent in them is irresponsible. To withhold the information we need to be effective in meeting and surviving immanent challenges is most certainly the ultimate crime against humanity.

For a timely wake-up call would serve to shake us out of self-denial and shatter the prisons of narrow thinking. It could rouse the courage to face up to the unknown, to slay the demons that lurk in the sub-rational mind. It might also open us up to our super-rational potentials and the distant calling of eternal life.

 THE BACK

The positive resolution of crime is atonement. In social relationships, it’s accomplished by setting wrongs right. At a personal level, it’s accomplished by returning to a lifestyle compatible with Natural Law. Lat the deepest level, at-one-ment is attained by overcoming separation and restoring one’s original at-one connection with conscience and the creative Source.

The negative consequence of unrepentant wrong doing is punishment. Breaking human laws, as Webster’s enumerates, precipitates punitive results. Over time, the Natural Law of Karma returns actions in kind to the doer. Retribution can be visited in many forms, from mental or physical disease, to personal, professional or financial misfortune. The biblical admonition holds true: As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

—————

Carl G. Jung, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 13.Alchemical Studies. (Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 1967.) p. 36.

Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. (Free Press: New York, 2003.) pp. 30, 31.

Phillip C. McGraw, Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out. (Free Press: New York, 2001.) pp. 12, 13.

Rethinking Our Common Humanity

Rethinking Survival

Excerpts

Without an accurate reality map, chances of success in life are slim to none. You need a complete picture of your potentials along with an accurate belief system, one that explains how the world works and what it expects of you.

Basing decisions on a worldview that’s distorted, incomplete or otherwise out of synch with the way things really are seriously diminishes chances of survival. In times as dangerous as these, it’s more important than ever to operate on correct and complete information.

But, as comparative religion legend Joseph Campbell observed, traditional creation stories no longer serve us well. He called for a re-vision of the timeless wisdom shared in common by the world’s great religions. We need a unifying view of creation that transcends cultural differences. In The Power of Myth, he put it this way:

“If we’re to solve the problem that’s confronting the world today, we will have develop a new mythology. The old myths are no longer serving us. We don’t have a mythology for people recognizing the humanity of a person on the other side of the hemisphere. I’ve often wondered if some of the notions coming out of quantum physics, quantum interconnectedness, don’t express that.”

Humanity needs a more inclusive reality map, one people worldwide can understand and identify with. The Positive Paradigm model meets this urgent need. It’s based on universally recognized and accepted physics, discovered by an internationally known and loved world citizen, Albert Einstein.

The Positive Paradigm of Change pictures an elegantly simply yet complete and correct reality map that accords with the way life truly is. It meets the Occam’s Razor standard: maximum inclusiveness with greatest simplicity. It has the power to give life travelers, wherever their journey starts, a new vision of life’s possibilities and with it, a realistic hope of survival.

It’s not “myth” as the slang implies, meaning unscientific, false and fictitious. To the contrary, it’s pure science, meaning “with knowledge.” It expresses the perennial philosophy embodied in the world’s great scriptures and shows them to be compatible with modern physics. The Positive Paradigm is equally consistent with science, the visionary poetry of culture-specific myths, and the Star Wars movies of George Lucas.

The Positive Paradigm structure satisfies Campbell’s call for a new mythology as the term is traditionally used. It is a symbolic representation of the creation story (genesis) and how humans fit into the picture. If it has a hero, as myths are said to center around a key figure, it would be Albert Einstein. He intuited the unifying theory which Campbell sought, and gave us the formula which, when plugged into Positive Paradigm Wheel, bridges the apparent gap between world religions and modern science.

The Positive Paradigm pictures what Campbell called “quantum interconnectedness:” a circle that, no matter where on the surface people stand, they are all connected to the same center. Every spoke of the wheel is linked to one unifying hub. The Positive Paradigm Wheel (which represents the whole world, of which everyone is part) literally gives us Einstein’s option of “widening the circle of compassion.”

It pictures a worldview where delusional separatist thinking has no place. Because, contrary to the conventional, competitive manner of thinking, the apex of individual achievement isn’t to rise above, separate from and dominate others. Quite the opposite. Paradoxically, the pinnacle of human attainment rests at the center of the Wheel of Life. Here, the illusion of Einstein’s dreaded separateness disappears.

Uniqueness belongs to the surface of the wheel, but the true height of attainment rests within. However, when the surface is linked with the center in an endless, infinite loop, there’s no conflict between individual freedom and universal compassion.

Tyrants of the world hate enlightened unity. They’ll do anything to prevent you from remembering that everyone, everywhere shares a common origin, that we are all inherently okay.

Because once you know this, as Einstein did, no one can intimidate, control or dominate you. No one can sell you on the virtue of warring against your neighbor. You’re aware that nothing anyone has for sale can make you more perfect. Nor can anything that anyone threatens to take away alter your essential okayness. It’s your inalienable birthright. A given.

“You are already okay.” This is the basic premise of the Positive Paradigm. It’s the realistic foundation upon which to build valid self-esteem. It’s the key to personal freedom — freedom from ignorance, freedom from fear. It’s the rock-solid foundation of functional democracy. It’s grounds for rethinking what the word really means and how to implement its promise.

One minor caveat: it all depends. While we all have the option to remember who we truly are, most of us are like Lambert, the sheepish lion. It takes a smack with a two-by-four upside the head before we’re finally ready to WAKE UP.

Often it takes the form of life-threatening danger to those we care for. A personal health crisis will also do the trick. So will job loss or a run-in with natural disaster. But, like Dorothy stranded in the land of Oz, when you want dearly enough to return “home,” you can click your heels whenever you chose — and come to find out, you’re already there.

Educators can use the Positive Paradigm of Change as a positive tool for motivating students. It is easy to understand, uplifting and unifying. It confirms the innate okayness of everyone everywhere. It simplifies the essence of world religions without bias. It emphasizes the importance of rational thinking and is compatible with science. It shows students the importance of experiencing every aspect of their lives. It’s the optimal tool for building the philosopher kings urgently needed today.

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Rethinking Survival can be purchased at amazon.com.

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